Alain C.

About

DevOps Team Lead with 15+ years building and leading high-performing remote teams across Europe and the Middle East. I turn infrastructure into a competitive advantage — automating CI/CD pipelines, scaling cloud environments on AWS and Azure, and enabling dev teams to ship faster with confidence. Remote-first by design: I lead fully distributed teams across time zones on a foundation of trust, async communication, and strong engineering culture. I also build the AI tooling my teams run on — a fleet of custom subagents and Claude Code skills, wired into Linear, GitLab, AWS, and Kubernetes over MCP, that automate infrastructure review, GitOps onboarding, and ticket refinement under least-privilege tool scopes, with every AI-assisted change traceable to a ticket. Open to DevOps Lead, Head of DevOps, and DevOps Architect roles — remote or hybrid, B2B or employee.

15+

years

40%

AWS savings

50%

less downtime

3

languages

Selected highlights

• Cut deployment cycles 1 month → 2 days

  Replaced slow, manual release processes with automated CI/CD and GitOps so engineering teams could ship multiple times a week instead of once a month.

• 40% AWS cost reduction

  Cut recurring cloud spend by ~40% through infrastructure optimisation: right-sized compute, consolidated databases, and pruned unused services.

• 50% less downtime · 80% better availability

  Improved customer-facing reliability with resilient architecture, autoscaling, and proactive operations across production environments.

• Built & led remote DevOps teams

  Grew distributed teams from the ground up across Europe and the Middle East — hiring, structured 1:1s, retros, and mentoring focused on engineer ownership.

• Compliance-ready infrastructure — C5 (BSI) and ISO 27001

  Aligned cloud infrastructure design, access controls, and operational processes with the BSI Cloud Computing Compliance Criteria Catalogue (C5) and ISO 27001 information-security standards — meeting the bar for regulated B2B and healthcare-sector deployments.

AI & agentic engineering

I run AI agents as production tooling, not as a demo. I build and maintain the agent layer of a live infrastructure repository — custom subagents, skills, and Model Context Protocol integrations that encode team process as executable, version-controlled workflows. The design rule is the one I already apply to infrastructure: least privilege and separation of duties. Agents that review never hold write access, and agents that author are audited by a different agent before anything reaches production.

• A fleet of purpose-built infrastructure agents

  Built and maintain seven custom subagents for a production infrastructure repo — Terraform, Ansible, ArgoCD, and general DevOps specialists, each scoped to its own tools and source-of-truth docs. Authoring and review are deliberately separate agents: one writes the HCL, another audits it for state safety, blast radius, and least-privilege IAM before any apply.

• Multi-agent review against live infrastructure

  A review skill fans out five reviewers in parallel — Terraform, Ansible, security, architecture, and conventions-versus-ticket completeness — then merges them into a single report. Verification agents run repo lint plus read-only AWS and kubectl queries, so findings are checked against real cluster state rather than the text of the diff.

• Least privilege, enforced in configuration

  Every agent and skill declares an explicit tool allowlist. The review pipeline is granted read verbs only — describe, get, list, logs — and is hard-blocked from write and edit tools entirely, so an agent can inspect production without ever holding a path to change it.

• Governance and auditability for AI-assisted work

  The repo's agent configuration is a source of truth under version control: a maintained operating policy, documented conventions, and a session-start hook that requires every AI session to be tied to a Linear or Jira ticket — so AI-assisted changes stay exactly as traceable as any other change.

• Automating the GitOps onboarding path

  An onboarding skill walks a new service through the full CD path: registering ArgoCD applications for dev and production, wiring CI’s image-tag write-back into values, publishing OCI Helm charts and images to ECR, and setting up semantic-release publish workflows.

• Rolling it out to the team

  Documented and standardised the MCP setup — Linear, Notion, the AWS Agent Toolkit, Terraform registry resolution, and diagram rendering — so the whole team runs the same agents against the same shared context instead of each engineer improvising their own prompts.

Experience

doctorly — DevOps Team Lead

Feb 2026 – Present · Berlin, Germany

Returning to doctorly to continue evolving the platform built during the 2022–2025 stint below: Kubernetes on AWS, multi-environment Terraform, GitLab CI/CD with security scanning, and ArgoCD-driven deployments.

CompuGroup Medical SE & Co. KGaA — DevOps Tech Lead

May 2025 – Jan 2026 · Germany

Highlights

• Built the Azure cloud infrastructure entirely from scratch.
• Designed a Terraform umbrella-module architecture for scalable, consistent multi-tenant and multi-environment provisioning.
• Introduced ArgoCD for a true GitOps workflow: dev environments auto-update on every commit; production releases trigger only on Helm chart version or values-file changes.
• Deployed and managed AKS with zone-aware node pools; integrated APISIX as the API Gateway with automated tenant onboarding.
• Documented DNS changes, migration checklists, and operational runbooks to ensure team continuity.
• Contributed to the company's C5 (BSI Cloud Computing Compliance Criteria Catalogue) compliance effort — infrastructure design, access controls, and operational processes.

doctorly — DevOps Team Lead

Mar 2022 – Apr 2025 · Berlin, Germany

DevOps Lead & Infrastructure Architect — led the design and delivery of doctorly's complete infrastructure and CI/CD ecosystem from the ground up, while driving the multi-tenancy initiative.

Team leadership

• Built and managed a 3–5 person team through structured standups, 1:1s, and retrospectives.
• Spearheaded hiring and professional development to scale the team's technical capabilities.

Infrastructure

• Owned the entire stack — AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible — across 5 production environments.
• Maintained infrastructure-as-code repos with rigorous standards.
• Proactively managed technical modernisation (ingress → API Gateway migrations, Terraform module upgrades).

CI/CD & security

• Architected multi-stage GitLab CI/CD pipelines with SAST, dependency, secret, and container scanning.
• Built custom CLI tooling to streamline day-to-day operations.
• Deployed ArgoCD for GitOps-driven deployments.

Technical decision-making

• Lead on Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible, AWS, Docker, Linux, and Nginx.
• Mentored the team on troubleshooting and incident response while balancing modernisation with stability.

serVme — Lead DevOps Engineer

Dec 2020 – Mar 2022 · Beirut, Lebanon

• Migrated from a classic architecture to a fully automated CI/CD pipeline using EKS, Jenkins, and GitOps.
• Designed a resilient architecture with horizontal and vertical autoscaling.
• Managed, improved, and monitored cloud infrastructure on AWS using Terraform and CloudWatch.
• Built and deployed Docker containers to break up a monolith into microservices, improving developer workflow, scalability, and speed.
• Managed GitHub/Bitbucket repositories and permissions, including branching.
• Reduced deployment time and AWS costs by eliminating unnecessary servers and consolidating databases.
• Wrote Ansible playbooks to configure and manage servers.

CMA CGM — Digital Tech Lead

Feb 2020 – Nov 2020 · Beirut, Lebanon

• Led a team focused on software development, releases, and engineering delivery.
• Hired and trained staff, delegated work, and partnered with colleagues on DevOps obstacles.
• Introduced Agile methodologies (Scrum and Kanban) and GitOps best practices.
• Hands-on with Docker and Kubernetes; defined the SDLC for smoother development workflows.

Inimoney Fintech — Head of Quality Assurance / DevOps Team Lead

Jul 2018 – Jan 2020 · Beirut, Lebanon

As Head of QA (Dec 2018 – Jan 2020)

• Worked closely with DevOps and the testing team to define the optimal solution.
• Owned QA operational requirements — scheduling, assignment, and follow-up on work results.
• Built and maintained QA staff (DevOps and Test departments) via recruiting, orienting, and training.
• Automated testing with Protractor and Newman for the CI/CD pipeline.

As DevOps Team Lead (Jul 2018 – Jan 2020)

• Team management and mentoring — weekly standups, task assignment, and follow-up (Kanban in Jira).
• Recruitment and team growth.
• Created and maintained a fully automated CI/CD pipeline using Jenkins, Docker, Git, and Helm.
• Managed cloud infrastructure on AWS (EC2, S3, RDS) — backups, patches, scaling.
• Integrated security and compliance into the CI/CD pipeline; performed security scans.
• Deployed Kubernetes clusters on AWS using Kubespray; monitored with Prometheus and Grafana.
• Wrote Ansible playbooks (IaC) and managed GitHub repos, branching, webhooks, and GitOps best practices.
• Kept documentation up to date in Confluence.

Keeward Group — DevOps System Engineer / IT Manager

Jun 2012 – Jun 2018 · Beirut, Lebanon

DevOps System Engineer

• Installed, configured, administered, and troubleshot Linux servers (Ansible-driven) running Apache/Nginx, Varnish/HAProxy, and Redis.
• Designed, implemented, and maintained a dynamic infrastructure to support software development, test, and deployment (CI/CD).
• Deployed caching solutions (Varnish, Redis, Nginx) and a Postfix/Dovecot mail server.
• Monitored servers and network equipment using PingDom, NewRelic, DataDogHQ, Monit, Observium, and Nagios.
• Built architectures on Debian/Ubuntu with virtualisation; configured Cisco network equipment (WAP4410N, C3560X, ASA 5505).
• Ran a hybrid-cloud architecture across AWS, OVH, and Heroku.
• Worked Agile/Scrum with Jira and Confluence; tooling: Ansible, GitLab, GitLab CI, Docker, Docker Compose.

IT Manager (parallel role)

• Managed information technology and computer systems; planned, organised, and evaluated IT data operations.
• Recruited, trained, and coached IT staff; communicated expectations and appraised performance.
• Designed and coordinated IT systems, policies, and procedures; managed accounts and access lifecycle.
• Ensured data security, network access, and backup integrity.
• Handled annual budget and procurement, ensuring cost-effectiveness.

Earlier roles

• ARUMTEC — Linux System Engineer (for ESMA) · Jan 2012 – May 2012 · Paris, France
• Sollan — IT Manager · May 2010 – Dec 2011
• North Caspian Operating Company — Service Desk Administrator · Nov 2009 – May 2010
• Xnet Conseils — IT Manager · Sep 2008 – Sep 2009
• Orange Business Services — Network Support Technician · Jul 2008 – Aug 2008
• Lycée Sainte Thérèse — System and Network Administrator · Jan 2008 – Apr 2008

Skills

Education

• Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers — Analysis and Conception of System Information and Decisions, Computer Science · 2008 – 2009
• IB Formation, France — VMware vSphere 4.1 · 2011
• DIAFOR, France — System and Network Administration · 2007 – 2008
• Université de Rennes I — DEUG, Science · 2003 – 2005
• Collège De la Sagesse — High School Diploma, Mathematics · 1984 – 2001

Languages

Lebanese (native) · French (native) · English (professional working)

Get in touch

Open to DevOps Lead, Head of DevOps, and DevOps Architect roles — remote, hybrid, B2B or employee.