Available for platform work

Reza Chalak

DevOps Engineer · Vienna, Austria

I build and run the infrastructure and supply chains that ship software — on bare metal, in air-gapped racks, and across AWS and Azure.

Read the résumé Get in touch

9+: Years in production
300+: Air-gapped servers managed
30%: AWS spend removed
5M: Users served by backends built

The stack I run

top to bottom

L4DeliveryArgoCD · FluxCD · GitLab CI · HelmEvery environment reconciled from git.

L3PlatformKubernetes · Talos · EKS · AKS · CiliumImmutable nodes, declarative clusters.

L2ReliabilityPrometheus · Grafana · OpenTelemetry · VeleroSignals first, then defined RTO/RPO.

L1FoundationLinux · Terraform · Ansible · pfSenseBare metal, air-gapped racks, and cloud alike.

What I do

6 areas

Kubernetes Platform Engineering

Clusters that survive contact with production — on bare metal with Talos, or managed on EKS and AKS.

GitOps & CI/CD

One source of truth for every environment, so releases stop depending on who is at the keyboard.

Cloud & Cost Optimization

Right-sized infrastructure on AWS, Azure, and Hetzner — backed by load-test data, not guesswork.

Observability & Reliability

Know what broke before the customer tells you, and know how to get it back.

Air-gapped & Regulated Environments

Infrastructure for sites with no internet, strict audits, and no room for improvisation.

AI Agents in Production

Getting agents past the demo and onto the same release train as everything else.

All services

Where I am now

current

Jan 2025 — Sep 2026

Senior DevOps Engineer @ ProLion

Austria · Hybrid

Migrated the on-premises appliance from Docker Swarm to Kubernetes on Talos Linux, for air-gapped customer deployments.
Managed Azure infrastructure for internal services and customer-facing products, including ad-hoc preview environments using central ArgoCD.
Deployed AI agents as part of the product, built and released through GitOps-managed CI/CD pipelines.

Full history

Latest post

writing

Sep 2026 · 12 min read

Immutable, Minimal, Mighty: Running Kubernetes on Bare Metal with Talos

The companion writeup to my CNCF Vienna talk: what happens when you apply Kubernetes' own design principles to the operating system underneath it — plus the full GitOps demo that runs on one laptop, and every trap I hit building it.

TalosBare MetalKubernetesGitOpsFlux

All posts

Got a cluster to build, a migration to survive, or a bill to cut?

I'm based in Vienna and work with teams anywhere. Send me the problem — I'll tell you honestly whether I'm the right person for it.

rezachalak.dev@gmail.com other channels →