โ˜… Who I am

About me

Updated 29 August 2026

zaeem@ops โ€” ~ ยท zsh
zaeem@ops:~$ cat about_zaeem.txt
Systems & DevOps engineer โ€” seven years of keeping software online.
Based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, running mission-critical software
infrastructure: telecom and fintech transaction platforms.
zaeem@ops:~$ โ–ˆ

โš™๏ธ What I actually do

I run production the way it should be run: boring. Multi-master Kubernetes clusters with automatic failover, GitOps deployments through ArgoCD that can be rolled back with a git revert, Galera database replication fronted by MaxScale, and monitoring โ€” Nagios, Prometheus, Grafana โ€” that finds problems before customers do. The result is 99.9% uptime across production sites, and change requests that land in production with minimal or no downtime.

I also lead a team of four engineers, load-test everything with Gatling before it meets real traffic, and document every site so that no system depends on what's only in my head. My operating philosophy: make yourself replaceable in operations, and irreplaceable in vision.

๐Ÿ“ก Where I come from

Telecom โ€” the school of hard knocks for uptime. At NAYAtel I went from configuring Huawei ATCA voice cores and SS7 interconnects to owning the national call centre's servers, where adding an automatic disaster-recovery site turned incidents into non-events: 100% uptime. My favourite project there wasn't technical at all: I pitched a "pay as you grow" commercial model for the PTCL interconnect and cut costs by 57%. Infrastructure engineering is business engineering, if you do it right.

Four promotions in under three years at NAYAtel, then to Seamless Distribution Systems, where I've grown from Systems Engineer to Technical Team Lead to DevOps Consultant โ€” running platforms that move airtime and mobile money, where every minute of downtime is measurable in lost transactions. Telecom taught me uptime; fintech-grade platforms taught me that uptime has a price tag. The infrastructure skills transfer to any domain where software must not go down.

๐Ÿค– Staying relevant: the AI chapter

The field is changing, and I'd rather shape that change than watch it. Right now I'm actively learning AI-assisted operations and building with it:

  • An AIOps project in my cloud lab: metric anomaly detection wired to an LLM assistant that drafts runbook steps from alert context โ€” operations experience meeting the AI tooling wave.
  • AI utilities on this site's toolbox, built and shipped, with more coming.
  • Daily use of AI tooling in my own workflow โ€” this portfolio itself is proof that an engineer plus AI ships faster than either alone.

The way I see it: AI won't replace operations engineers, but operations engineers who use AI well will replace those who don't. I intend to be in the first group.

๐ŸŽฏ Now

  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect โ€” Associate (2024, verifiable on my homepage)
  • CKA exam scheduled for September 2026
  • A five-project cloud platform lab in active build โ€” Terraform, EKS + ArgoCD, SLO engineering, Azure pipelines, AIOps โ€” with full write-ups landing on the Projects page as each completes
  • Open to Systems & DevOps roles โ€” Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, or relocation

When I'm not keeping servers honest, I'm cycling, jogging, or exploring โ€” the uptime of the engineer matters as much as the uptime of the system.