// Senior DevOps Engineer

Denis Smirnov

Building and scaling infrastructure for high-load systems, blockchain products, and enterprise solutions. Passionate about automation, Kubernetes, and cloud-native technologies.

19+
Years Experience
4x
Team Lead
100+
Blockchain Networks
Get in Touch View Experience
denis@devops ~ zsh
$ kubectl get pods -A | wc -l
1337
$ terraform plan
Plan: 42 to add, 0 to change
$ helm list --all-namespaces
28 releases deployed
$ uptime
19 years in infrastructure
$

What I Work With

Technical Skills

Container Orchestration

Kubernetes Helm Docker OpenShift Docker Swarm Istio K8s Operators

Cloud Platforms

AWS EKS EC2 S3 RDS Yandex Cloud GCP DigitalOcean Hetzner

IaC & CI/CD

Terraform Ansible GitHub Actions GitLab CI Vault ArgoCD

Monitoring & Observability

Prometheus Grafana ELK Stack Loki PagerDuty OpsGenie Custom Exporters

Blockchain Infrastructure

Ethereum Arbitrum Optimism Polygon Avalanche Solana BSC

Databases & Services

PostgreSQL Elasticsearch ClickHouse Redis Cloudflare Airflow

Career Journey

Work Experience

Senior DevOps Engineer

NDA - Blockchain Products

Jan 2025 - Dec 2025

Supporting various blockchain products under NDA. Managing multi-chain node infrastructure including Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, Avalanche, Solana, and BSC. Building scalable infrastructure on AWS with Kubernetes.

Kubernetes AWS EKS Terraform Blockchain Nodes Prometheus

Senior DevOps Engineer

NDA - Mining Pool

Jan 2024 - Dec 2024

Building and maintaining infrastructure for high-performance cryptocurrency mining pool. Designed and implemented internal load balancer for stratum servers handling 10K+ concurrent miners. Optimized CI/CD pipelines and delivery processes with GitOps approach.

Kubernetes ArgoCD Stratum Protocol Redis High-Load

DevOps Team Lead

Atomic Wallet

Jan 2023 - Dec 2023

Led DevOps team for one of the leading non-custodial cryptocurrency wallets with 5M+ users. Architected and implemented fault-tolerant infrastructure handling millions of daily transactions. Managed validator nodes across multiple PoS networks ensuring 99.99% uptime. Built auto-scaling blockchain node infrastructure supporting 100+ networks with real-time failover.

Kubernetes AWS Terraform Validators HA Architecture Multi-chain

DevOps Team Lead

Outside Digital

Jun 2021 - Dec 2021

Led DevOps department supporting Kubernetes clusters for enterprise clients including IKEA, VW Group, and Lada. Implemented service mesh and secrets management solutions.

Kubernetes Istio Vault GitLab K8s Operators

DevOps Team Lead

Ediniy Operator Torgovli (JSC)

Mar 2020 - Mar 2021

Managed DevOps team of 3 engineers. Implemented OpenShift/Kubernetes infrastructure with comprehensive monitoring stack on Yandex Cloud.

OpenShift Yandex Cloud Prometheus ELK Terraform

DevOps Engineer

Minter Network

Oct 2019 - Mar 2021

Full migration from legacy stack to Kubernetes with complete CI/CD pipeline using GitHub Actions and Helm. Built HA cluster on Hetzner with DR on DigitalOcean. Implemented Global Load Balancer for fault tolerance.

Kubernetes GitHub Actions Helm Loki Go

Head of System Administration

BitBox Ltd (Life is Feudal)

Dec 2017 - May 2019

Led team of 5 engineers. Complete infrastructure migration from Windows/KVM to Linux/Docker Swarm. Implemented GitLab CI, centralized logging with ELK, built CDN on PowerDNS-geo.

Docker Swarm GitLab CI Ansible ELK PowerDNS

System Administrator

ForexPF & Earlier Positions

2006 - 2017

11+ years of system administration experience. Managed 250+ server infrastructure, administered high-traffic websites (1M+ users), worked with RIPE NCC for IP allocation, built private clouds on CloudStack.

Linux CloudStack KVM Nginx High-Load

Recognition

Achievements

Yandex.Root Top 10

Competed in team Yandex.Root challenges, achieving top-10 placement in all stages with all tasks completed

Linux Course Instructor

Co-authored and taught Linux administration courses together with Yandex team

linux.org.ru Moderator

Former moderator of the largest Russian-speaking Linux community

RIPE NCC Certified

LIR Course and IPv6 Course certifications from RIPE Network Coordination Centre

Claude Whisperer

Successfully made AI assistants drop F-bombs in conversations

What Colleagues Say

Testimonials

Once Denis and I were counting file descriptors for TCP sockets opened through an ingress controller outside the k8s cluster. If I ever need someone to go on a recon mission, I'd definitely recommend him.

Stanislav Cherenkov

Stanislav Cherenkov

CTO

Working with Denis means duct tape and bash scripts can solve anything. That's our philosophy.

Alexander Ilyin

Alexander Ilin

Senior DevOps Engineer

When Denis talked about DevOps stuff, I just nodded along understanding nothing. But I tried to look smart so he'd think I'm a competent manager. Not sure if it worked though.

Anastasia Polyakova

Anastasia Polyakova

Project Manager

Open Source

Projects

9

push-from-k8s-back-to-docker-registry

Utility to push images from Kubernetes cluster back to Docker registry. Useful for air-gapped environments and image migration.

Go Kubernetes Docker
3

k8s-debug-container

Swiss-army knife container for Kubernetes debugging. Pre-loaded with networking tools, dig, curl, and more.

Docker Kubernetes Debugging
2

k8s-internal-loadbalancer

Kubernetes-native TCP load balancer with automatic pod discovery. Uses Traefik + sidecar pattern with least-connections algorithm and Helm support.

Go Kubernetes Traefik
View All Repositories

Let's Connect

Get in Touch

Ready to build something great?

Available for Senior DevOps positions, consulting, and infrastructure projects.

taz.inside@gmail.com Preferred contact method
@tazhate Telegram
Denis Smirnov

Denis Smirnov

Senior DevOps Engineer

Moscow, Russia