Iaroslav Vorozhko

What I care about

• People: I use RFCs, OKRs, Kanban and Scrum when they help, and I make continuous learning part of the job.
• Reliability: Service level objectives and error budgets let engineers and the business talk about risk in the same language.
• Automation: If I do something by hand twice, I automate it. If the automation breaks, I fix it.
• Security: It has to be there at every level: cloud, cluster, container and application code. That means access control, secrets management, multi-tenancy and a tested incident process.
• Platforms: Infrastructure as code, GitOps and CI/CD let teams test in ephemeral preview environments and ship with confidence.
• AI with guardrails: AI makes teams faster, but only when there are real tests and checks behind it.

Experience

2020 – present · McMakler

McMakler is the story of building a strong team and a strong platform. I lead the DevOps team. We run the Kubernetes platform on Google Cloud and AWS, observability, incident management, CI/CD and databases. Along the way my technical direction formed the platform which now supports hundred of services and many Merge requests a day to get build and deployed with the help of AI.

Our engineers build software together with coding agents, and my job is to make that safe at speed: CI/CD pipelines with agentic checks and reviews that hold every change to the same quality bar, whoever or whatever wrote it.

2018 – 2020 · Takeaway.com

At Takeaway.com I was Lead Site Reliability Engineer. I looked after several Kubernetes clusters on AWS, built the production Kubernetes platform and moved applications from Elastic Beanstalk to Kubernetes. I managed infrastructure with Terraform and CloudFormation, wrote disaster recovery scenarios, introduced SRE practices, supported MySQL, Kafka and Elasticsearch, and was on call. I also helped other teams with infrastructure and design, and coached my own team.

While I was there, Takeaway.com merged with the German Delivery Hero business, and it was quite a fast merge from a technical standpoint. I had been on the other side of a deal at Hungryhouse, so now I saw how a company changes when two businesses come together in a few months. It was also great to welcome colleagues from Delivery Hero that I had worked with before.

2012 – 2018 · Hungryhouse and Delivery Hero

I joined the Hungryhouse team, part of the Delivery Hero group, as a Senior PHP Developer. I worked on product search, new features and the Salesforce integration. In 2013 I moved to DevOps and release engineering. I built deployment tools, set up configuration management with SaltStack, and worked on monitoring, alerting and on-call.

In 2016 I became DevOps Team Lead. I set the technical direction for services running in the cloud and on-premise, and moved them to Kubernetes and a service-oriented architecture. We also ran a big performance project and made the platform handle six times more load. That helped us a lot on the busiest days of the year.

Hungryhouse was later acquired by Just Eat, which is now Just Eat Takeaway.com. Another good result for the team.

2012 · IndexDen (Startup founded and acquired)

In April 2012 I founded IndexDen and became its CEO. For eight months I did a bit of everything: managed the project, wrote code, talked to customers and built a team. Then Swiftype acquired it, and Swiftype later became part of Elastic. It was short, but I learned a lot about the business side of engineering.

2007 – 2012 · Percona and Ivinco · MySQL, Sphinx and big data

After Varien I joined Percona, a MySQL consulting company. Since MySQL was their whole business, I learned the database inside out there and became a MySQL expert. I worked as a PHP developer on the startup LinkAider.com and supported the CRM and Eventum.

Then I spent three years at Ivinco on high-load and big-data projects with MySQL and Sphinx Search. I also worked on open source projects there.

2004 – 2007 · Early career · PHP, shops and Magento

In 2004 I started as a freelance PHP developer. I built information portals, a web-money exchange service and a few CMS systems, and learned a lot about SEO along the way.

In 2006 I joined Varien, the company behind Magento. I built e-commerce applications on osCommerce and Magento, planned site architecture, tuned performance and worked as a MySQL DBA. Magento grew fast after that and was later acquired by eBay. It was nice to see a product I worked on go that far.

Toolbox

• Cloud and infrastructure: Google Cloud, AWS, on-prem data centers, Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Ansible, SaltStack
• Kubernetes and delivery: kubeadm, GKE, EKS, ArgoCD and GitOps, GitLab CI/CD, Jenkins, GitHub Actions
• Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Tempo, Thanos, Datadog, New Relic, Splunk
• Data and messaging: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, Kafka, RabbitMQ
• AI: agents (CrewAI, OpenHands), RAG, vector search, prompt engineering
• Security: HashiCorp Vault, Falco, Trivy, Prowler
• Code: Python, Go, Bash, JavaScript, Node.js, PHP

Education and certifications

Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer and System faculty, Kremenchuk Mykhailo Ostrohradskyi National University. AWS Certified SysOps Administrator, Certified Kubernetes Administrator, ITIL, and a Coursera course on reliable infrastructure in Google Cloud.

Get in touch

I write here about Kubernetes, reliability, agentic workflows and leading engineering teams. If you work on hard infrastructure problems, write to me.

• Projects & Code: Check out open source work and tools on my projects page.
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/iaroslav-vorozhko
• GitHub: github.com/vorozhko