- Establishing the company-wide SRE function as the first SRE hire.
Yurii Serhiichuk
Senior SRE | Cloud Architect
Katowice, Poland · [email protected] · GitHub · LinkedIn · Blog · Website
Google Developer Expert in Google Cloud and Modern Enterprise Architectures, and Champion Innovator in Serverless App Development. 10+ years running production cloud platforms — site reliability, cloud cost, zero-downtime migration, and AI-assisted engineering.
Experience
Owned Travelshift's infrastructure end-to-end — platform, reliability, security, developer experience, and AI-assisted engineering.
- Cut cloud costs 65% in 4 months (spot, right-sizing, autoscaling).
- Led a four-years-stalled AWS→GCP (GKE Autopilot) migration, delivered in under 8 months with zero customer-visible downtime across a gradual 1%→100% traffic shift and bidirectional database cutover.
- Operated a production AWS + GCP platform end-to-end — on AWS, EC2 Auto Scaling groups, ECS/Fargate, Lambda, RDS, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, and VPC/Route 53/IAM networking and access; on GCP, GKE Autopilot with Istio and KEDA — cloud infrastructure as code in Pulumi (migrated from Terraform) so any engineer can change it safely.
- Rebuilt incident management and on-call on PagerDuty — from 2 high-priority services to full per-service, database, and cache coverage with automated alerting, on-call escalation routing, and post-mortem workflows.
- Automated web protection and DDoS mitigation with Signal Sciences WAF, Fastly edge VCL rate-limiting, and JA3/JA4 TLS fingerprinting.
- Replaced long-lived cloud service-account keys with OIDC federation — GitHub Actions and Bitbucket as identity providers via Workload Identity Federation — for short-lived, keyless CI/CD credentials.
- Owned the secure SDLC — automated security scanning (gitleaks, AI-assisted review) in CI and centralized secrets management across Doppler, Google Secret Manager, and AWS Secrets Manager.
- Deployed Kubernetes workloads three ways — Pulumi, kubectl with Kustomize, and home-grown Helm charts for standardized infrastructure.
- Wrote Go across the platform — a Kubernetes operator that stitches Istio VirtualServices, internal stitching/edge proxies, and open-source tooling (Open Knowledge Format).
- Standardized observability and SLO/SLI tracking on OpenTelemetry — collectors with tail sampling across GCP and AWS — and consolidated the tracing backend from Grafana Cloud to SigNoz for cost and usability.
- Drove org-wide adoption of AI-assisted engineering — standardized on Claude Code, rolled out automated AI code review, and built MCP integrations for internal systems.
- Led the DevOps team and owned cross-team architecture reviews and solution-design sign-off for new initiatives — driving architecture decisions and code review across engineering teams.
- Built the company's first AI assistant — an interactive AI travel guide combining pre-processed itinerary data with LLM APIs.
- Replaced the Google Maps routing API with a self-hosted OSRM service — car, foot, and a rail profile our team built and curated, across Iceland and Europe — later adopted company-wide for significant cost savings.
- Architected the AI/data-generation platform for tight cost control — every subsystem scales to zero or runs fully serverless (Cloud Run, Cloud Functions, GCP Workflows) on reusable Pulumi (Python) components.
Select client engagements alongside full-time roles — embedded builder-consultant work on application development, AI systems, and cloud migration.
- AgencyEZ (US insurance platform) — ongoing architecture lead on AWS (Elastic Beanstalk, EC2 Auto Scaling, RDS/Aurora, SQS/SNS, ElastiCache, CloudWatch, AWS WAF): Java/MySQL modernization, a from-scratch public API (OpenAPI), AI-powered document processing, an EDI-based carrier-reporting framework, and an offline encrypted enrollment app for restricted, no-internet environments.
- Built and operated a multi-year national serverless quiz platform for Università Bocconi (Cloud Run, Firestore, Flask, Angular) at near-zero idle cost.
Lead developer for an image-processing cloud-based system.
- Lead engineer for a contract-only image-processing cloud platform — customer-facing, onboarding teams, and managing up to 5 engineers; architected on domain-driven design, event sourcing, and CQRS.
- One of four core maintainers of Spine Event Engine, TeamDev's open-source Java DDD/CQRS/event-sourcing framework — commit, merge, release, and design-review ownership from 0.10.x to v2.alpha.
- Designed the product's gRPC/Protobuf contracts — .proto schemas, services, and server implementations in Java, Python, and Node.js — plus custom protoc plugins for multi-language codegen.
- Improved system architecture and infrastructure, leading to a 40% infrastructure cost decrease.
Built and maintained billing and ordering systems for A1 Telekom Austria.
- Built and maintained A1 Telekom Austria's ordering & billing system (Java 7→8) on Tomcat/EJB with Apache Camel and Spring, integrating the Amdocs process manager.
Technical Skills
- Cloud & DevOps: Google Cloud Platform, AWS (ECS/Fargate, Lambda, RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB, VPC, IAM), Multi-cloud, Linux (CentOS, Amazon Linux), Kubernetes, Docker, Istio & Envoy, Helm, Fastly CDN & edge (VCL, Signal Sciences WAF), Serverless, CI/CD (GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Cloud Build), Pulumi, Terraform, Observability (Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Grafana, ELK/Elasticsearch), Secrets management (Doppler, HashiCorp Vault, Secret Manager), Load testing (k6)
- Languages: Java, Python, Go, TypeScript, Node.js (Fastify, Next.js), Shell scripting (Bash, zsh)
- Data & AI: GenAI & AI agents, RAG (Firestore vector search), MCP, ETL, Data Engineering, BigQuery, LLM-assisted engineering
Certifications
— Google Cloud (expires May 2027) Verify ↗
— Google Cloud (expires Sep 2027) Verify ↗
— Google Cloud (expires Oct 2027) Verify ↗
— Google Cloud (expires Dec 2027) Verify ↗
— The Linux Foundation (expires May 2028) Verify ↗
— The Linux Foundation (expires May 2028) Verify ↗
— Oracle (Apr 2021) Verify ↗
Awards & Achievements
- Google Developer Expert — Google: Recognized as a Google Developer Expert in Google Cloud and Modern Enterprise Architectures. Verify ↗
- Champion Innovator — Serverless App Development — Google Cloud Innovators: Recognized as a Champion in Serverless App Development by the Google Cloud Innovators program. Verify ↗
- Travel-plan algorithm — US & EU patents (US 11,747,153 · EP 4,310,742) — USPTO & EPO (co-author): Two-stage itinerary search under a fixed trip duration: a genetic algorithm selects the regions, then ant colony optimization the points of interest inside them. Granted Sep 2023, assigned to Travelshift. Verify ↗
Talks
- Cloud Workstations: reusable development environments in the cloud — GDG Cloud Fest Poland & DevFest Kraków 2025
Writing
- From Autopilot to Standard GKE: The Key to 15x Cheaper Istio — Google Cloud (Medium)
- Is the future of autonomous AI agents already here? Jules API and MCP — Google Cloud (Medium)
Education
- Master of Science, Kharkiv National University of Radioelectronics — Security of Information & Communication Systems