Available for contracts · Remote

Francisco Meza

Staff DevOps & Platform Engineer

Los Angeles, CA

Currently Staff DevOps @ MixMode (AI security platform) — taking select contracts

$0K

AWS savings this year

$0K+

saved at PubNub

0 yrs

in production infrastructure

What I Do

Platform Engineering

Build and operate EKS clusters, GitOps pipelines, and internal platform tooling. I've run 11+ clusters across prod and non-prod with multi-account ArgoCD.

Cost Optimization

Cut $350K/year at my current company, $750K+/year at PubNub. Karpenter, right-sizing, EBS cleanup, spot adoption — done in production, not in theory.

Observability

VictoriaMetrics, Grafana, AlertManager, Loki. I've deployed this stack at three companies. I also build internal tooling on top of it.

Internal Tooling & Automation

When teams keep doing something manually, I build the tool that automates it. FastAPI, Python, GitLab integrations, AI-assisted workflows.

Recent Work

Sanitized for confidentiality

Kubernetes Cost Reduction — AI Security Platform

Cut $350K/year through Karpenter spot scheduling and dangling EBS volume cleanup. No performance degradation, no production incidents.

Karpenter EKS Terraform

Monitoring Stack Replacement — Real-Time Messaging Platform

Replaced existing monitoring tooling with VictoriaMetrics. $750K+/year saved. Deployed to EKS via ArgoCD with full Slack/PagerDuty alerting.

VictoriaMetrics ArgoCD AWS EKS

Multi-Cluster GitOps — 11 EKS Clusters

Built centralized ArgoCD setup managing deployments across 11 clusters and multiple AWS accounts using cross-account IRSA. Cluster spin-up went from days to a few hours.

ArgoCD Terraform IRSA

AlertManager Configuration Platform

Built internal web app (FastAPI + HTMX) so engineers can manage AlertManager routes and receivers through a UI — all changes produce GitLab MRs automatically. GitOps workflow without touching YAML.

FastAPI Python GitLab API Kubernetes

AI-Assisted Reliability Orchestrator

in progress

Architecting a failure classification and remediation system using LangGraph + FastAPI. Rule-based triage first, LLM reasoning only for anomalies. Structured output with confidence scores and approval gates.

LangGraph FastAPI Redis AI/ML

How to Work With Me

Contract / Embedded DevOps

3–6 month contracts. I work as a Staff-level IC — I write code, build systems, run the on-call, and ship things. Not advisory, not oversight. Actual work.

Good fit if you need

  • Senior platform engineer without a full-time hire
  • EKS infrastructure built or stabilized
  • GitOps and CI/CD overhaul
  • Observability stack deployed and working
  • Internal tooling that your team keeps doing manually

Rate available on request. Starting with a short discovery call.

Start the conversation →

$750 Cost Audit

Low commitment

Not ready for a full engagement? Start here.

One-time audit includes

  • AWS cost breakdown (EC2, EBS, NAT, EKS)
  • Kubernetes resource and capacity analysis
  • Karpenter / spot optimization opportunities
  • Ranked list: quick wins and long-term savings
  • 30-minute walkthrough call

Delivered in 5 business days.

Book the audit →

About

I've been doing this for 12 years. Started at a VoIP company patching ShellShock across 20,000 servers with a Perl script, now I'm running infrastructure for AI security platforms and building AI-assisted reliability tools.

Most of my career has been at companies where I was the DevOps team, or close to it — which means I know how to operate at Staff level without needing a lot of hand-holding. I care about systems that actually work and tooling that makes engineers' lives less painful.

I'm based in Los Angeles. I work remotely.

Work With Me

Fill this out and I'll follow up by email within one business day. If it sounds like a fit, we'll set up a call from there — no pressure, no sales pitch.

I'll reply by email first, then we'll schedule a call.