DevOps & platform engineer · Chicago, IL

Herman Ilchenko

Four years building the path other engineers ship through.

I build the delivery platforms other engineers ship through — clusters, pipelines and the tooling around them — and I can tell you what each choice costs.

Get in touch Experience
0EKS clusters owned
0Services in production
0Engineers shipping on it
0Years in production

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who

About me

DevOps engineer in Chicago. I own the Kubernetes platform 40 product engineers ship on — ten EKS clusters across three environments, 60+ services — along with the delivery path around it: pipelines, GitOps releases, alerting, and the agent that takes the first pass on every pull request.

Before that, two years at a consumer-lending fintech bringing an AWS estate under Terraform and moving its EC2 fleet onto immutable images. That's where most of my opinions about delivery come from: what a platform gives you for free stays invisible until you ship something without it.

KubernetesTerraform GitOpsObservability Immutable deliveryAgentic AI
herman@infra — ~/about
$ platform describe --scope
10 EKS clusters · 3 environments · 60+ services · 40 engineers
$ release rollback --how
sync the previous chart revision. no SSH, no rebuild.
$ alerts diff --before --after
~35 pages/week → under 10. the rest became dashboards.
$ agents where
in the pipeline — first pass on every pull request
$
what

Skills & tools

herman@infra — ~/skills
$ stack --by-layer

☁️ Cloud & Infrastructure

AWSEC2VPCIAMS3RDSRoute53ACMSecrets ManagerASG/ALBLinux

📦 Containers & Orchestration

KubernetesEKSDockerHelmArgoCD

🏗️ IaC & Image Building

TerraformCloudFormationPacker

🔄 CI/CD & GitOps

GitHub ActionsGitLab CIJenkinsArgoCD

📊 Observability

PrometheusGrafanaAlertmanagerCloudWatchDatadog

🔒 Security & Access

IAM / OIDC CI authKubernetes RBACServiceAccountsSecret scanning

🤖 AI & Agentic

Claude CodeAgent skillsAI code review

⌨️ Scripting & App Stack

BashPythonJavaNGINXsystemdMySQL / RDS
where

Experience

RelativityCurrent

Aug 2024 — Present · Chicago, IL · E-discovery SaaS for legal teams

DevOps Engineer

  • Owned the Kubernetes platform that 40 product engineers shipped on: 10 EKS clusters across 3 environments, 60+ services in production.
  • Rebuilt platform alerting — pages split from dashboard noise, ~35 a week down to under 10.
  • Migrated 15+ services from Jenkins to GitHub Actions and ArgoCD-delivered Helm charts, retiring the Jenkins controller — a rollback is now a sync to the previous chart version.
  • Built an AI PR-review agent (Claude Code GitHub Action) across 30 repos — checks each PR against its Jira ticket and flags exposed secrets before human review.
EKSArgoCDHelmGitHub ActionsCloudWatchClaude Code
Enova International

Jun 2022 — Jul 2024 · Chicago, IL · NYSE-listed consumer-lending fintech

Cloud Engineer

  • Brought loan servicing and payments under Terraform across 12 accounts and 3 environments, so every infrastructure change went through a reviewed pull request instead of a console click.
  • Replaced ~120 hand-built hosts with immutable Packer AMIs and a GitLab CI bake-apply-health-check pipeline — SSH access to production retired, every deploy traceable to a single image ID.
  • Built the CloudWatch dashboards and alarms the rotation ran on, so payment and servicing failures paged instead of arriving as customer complaints.
TerraformPackerGitLab CIEC2 / ASGSecrets ManagerCloudWatch
proof

Certifications

AWS Solutions Architect — Associateto 2029
Certified Kubernetes Administratorto 2028
Certified Kubernetes Application Developerto 2028
HashiCorp Terraform Associateto 2028

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