Alexander Kharkevich's Blog

Alexander Kharkevich

Contact information:

📞 1-437-249-0833 📧 alex@kharkevich.org

Summary

Strategic Systems and DevOps leader with over a decade of experience architecting enterprise-scale Infrastructure- and Platform-as-a-Service (IaaS/PaaS) solutions that drive business transformation and operational excellence. Combines deep technical expertise in custom Terraform, Pulumi, and Ansible modules/providers with strategic vision to align infrastructure investments with organizational goals, reduce operational costs, and accelerate time-to-market for digital initiatives.

Currently serving as technical leader for the Data DevOps Americas department at EPAM Systems (20+ engineers across NA and LATAM), driving cross-functional collaboration, technology roadmap planning, and talent development while maintaining hands-on technical leadership. Proven ability to translate complex technical challenges into business opportunities, establishing center-of-excellence practices and standardized delivery frameworks that scale across global enterprise clients.

Strategic focus on cloud-first transformation, infrastructure modernization, and platform standardization using technologies including multi-tenant PaaS with OpenShift, Juju, and MAAS; distributed storage systems with Ceph, TrueNAS, and S3-compatible stores; and hybrid infrastructure architectures. Known for building high-performing teams that deliver measurable business impact through technical excellence and strategic execution.

Core Competencies

  • Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, Pulumi, Ansible — including authoring custom providers and automation modules
  • Platform as a Service (PaaS): OpenShift, Ubuntu Juju, Metal-as-a-Service (MAAS)
  • Private Cloud & Virtualization: Proxmox, VMware vSphere, KVM, OpenStack
  • Storage & Networking: Ceph, TrueNAS, MinIO, NFS, iSCSI, VLAN/VXLAN
  • Datacenter Operations: Bare-metal provisioning, rack design, capacity planning, high-availability clusters
  • Cloud & Hybrid Environments: AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, hybrid/multi-cloud integration
  • CI/CD & DevOps: GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, GitLab CI
  • Machine Learning & Data: MLflow, Apache Airflow, Spark, Databricks
  • Orchestration & Containers: Kubernetes, Anthos
  • GitOps: ArgoCD, Helm
  • Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB
  • Search: OpenSearch, Elasticsearch
  • Messaging & Streams: Kafka
  • Security & IAM: OIDC, SAML, fine-grained IAM automation, Secrets Management
  • Programming & Scripting: Python, Go, JavaScript/TypeScript, Bash — automation, API integration, and backend services

Open-Source Contributions

Professional Experience

Chief Systems Engineer II / I — EPAM Systems

Feb 2021 – Present

  • Act as both technical architect and senior implementation engineer for multiple global clients
  • Lead 20+ engineers across North and Latin America, enabling DevOps adoption, SDLC maturity, and production reliability
  • Build CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure modules, monitoring stacks, and deployment automation
  • Design and deploy secure-by-default Kubernetes environments with GitOps via ArgoCD
  • Drive client success through end-to-end, hands-on involvement — from whiteboard to code, CI to production
  • Architect hybrid deployments combining AWS and on-premise resources
  • Implement observability stacks with Prometheus, Grafana, and Loki, plus automated self-healing policies for infrastructure services
  • Design CI/CD pipelines for ML and data workflows, integrating IaC and PaaS deployment automation
  • Deliver hands-on workshops and code bootstraps to client teams

Earlier roles — Lead/Senior Systems Engineer, Software Engineer — EPAM Systems

Oct 2014 – Feb 2021

  • Full-time, hands-on delivery: scripting, cloud automation, system hardening, migration, and integration
  • Gained exposure to a broad technology landscape: AWS, Azure, on-premise Linux/Windows, Spark clusters, and more
  • Transitioned from test engineer to systems expert by proving depth across full delivery lifecycle
  • Authored Terraform and Pulumi plugins to integrate nonstandard APIs for internal resource management and policy enforcement
  • Architected full-stack private cloud with Proxmox virtualization, Ceph storage, and OpenShift (OKD)-based PaaS layer
  • Developed Terraform and Ansible modules for automated provisioning of compute, storage, and networking layers

Memorable Projects

  • Baker Hughes — Systems architecture and hands-on implementation for a SaaS solution, AWS Cloud and on-premise
  • Sonepar — Architecture for an R&D platform; SDLC design and implementation, Azure Cloud
  • Rogers Communications — Architecture and SDLC for customer-facing platform, AWS Cloud
  • Schneider Electric — Migration and modernization of web infrastructure, on-premise and AWS Cloud
  • HKEX (Hong Kong Exchange) — SDLC for process automation tooling, on-premise

More details can be shared after NDA signing

Community & Recognition

Education

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