Profile
Staff Platform Engineer with 15+ years of experience architecting resilient, multi-cloud (AWS, GCP) platforms, FinOps strategies, and zero-trust self-service infrastructure for 200+ engineers.
Proven technical leader driving complex multi-region migrations, Kubernetes orchestration, and DORA compliance, establishing engineering standards, and aligning platform roadmaps with business priorities to eliminate operational risk and optimize TCO.
Authored cross-domain platform RFCs and established Architectural Decision Records (ADRs), driving consensus across 20+ teams for IaC and multi-region deployment standards.
Top Skills
- Containers & Orchestration — Expert: Docker, Helm, Containerd, Podman, Kubernetes
- GitOps & CI/CD — Expert: FluxCD, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD
- Languages — Advanced: Go, Bash, TypeScript, Python
- Cloud Providers — Advanced: GCP, Azure, IBM Cloud, DigitalOcean, AWS
- IaC & Automation — Expert: Terraform, Nix, Ansible, Pulumi
- Networking — Advanced: Cert-Manager, Istio, Cloudflare
- Observability & Monitoring — Advanced: Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, Elasticsearch, OpenTelemetry
- Security & Compliance — Advanced: SOC 2, IAM Governance, KMS / Vault, Zero Trust, DORA, HashiCorp Vault
Work Experience
Prima Assicurazioni (prima.it) — Staff Platform Engineer (Jan 2025 - Present)
Remote (EU)
- Core Platform Leadership & IaC Standards: Lead a 6-engineer Core Platform team within the Infrastructure Domain supporting 200+ engineers; defined the platform roadmap and overhauled core Pulumi (Python) libraries, standardizing IaC definitions across 20+ engineering squads.
- Large-Scale RDS Modernization: Directed end-to-end multi-region PostgreSQL (Aurora RDS) major upgrade program across 10TB+ data footprints in the UK, Spain, and Italy with zero unplanned downtime; eliminated legacy extended-support risks and lowered cloud spend by modernizing RDS instance families.
- Kafka Governance & Security Compliance: Overhauled enterprise Kafka security and IAM governance (Zero Trust access, service account consolidation, strict IaC alignment), reducing Kafka TCO by 30% (~€60K/year), cutting onboarding time by 50%, and aligning with DORA regulatory standards.
- Reliability & Technical Governance: Established pre-mortem documentation standards, migration guidelines, and operational runbooks, serving as technical anchor and resolving high-stakes architectural blockers during incidents.
Sysdig — Staff Infrastructure Engineer (Jan 2023 - Jan 2025)
Remote (EU)
- Platform Team Leadership & Talent Enablement: Served as Tech Lead for a 3-engineer infrastructure squad; led technical hiring panels, onboarded 2 senior engineers, and fostered cross-team collaboration across all engineering departments to deliver quarterly infrastructure initiatives on schedule.
- CI/CD Modernization: Spearheaded company-wide CI migration from legacy Jenkins to GitHub Actions with auto-scaling self-hosted runners on Kubernetes across 100+ repositories, reducing CI queue times by 45% and cutting cloud compute costs by €45K/month.
- GitOps Self-Service Adoption: Architected and rolled out FluxCD-based GitOps Continuous Delivery across global Kubernetes clusters, accelerating release velocity by 10x and eliminating cluster drift through automated self-reconciliation.
- Developer Experience & Nix Tooling: Championed adoption of Nix shells and standardized OpenAPI specifications across customer-facing services, slashing local environment configuration time from hours to minutes.
- Reliability Engineering & SRE: Introduced and reviewed service-level objectives (SLOs/SLIs) across critical SaaS services, improving platform uptime and serving as Incident Commander on L2/L3 SaaS incident rotations.
Sysdig — Sr. Infrastructure Engineer (Oct 2020 - Jan 2023)
Remote (EU)
- Global Multi-Cloud Scale: Maintained and scaled global SaaS infrastructure spanning 15 regions and 4 major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, IBM Cloud), ensuring high availability for enterprise customers.
- Container Egress & Reliability Optimization: Designed and deployed a Containerd pull-through caching layer across Kubernetes clusters, halving network data egress costs by ~€15K/month and eliminating single-point-of-failure risks during upstream registry outages.
- IaC Standardization: Replaced manual cloud provisioning by architecting comprehensive Terraform IaC modules with strict tagging and naming conventions across AWS, GCP, and IBM Cloud.
- Stateful Data Services Lifecycle: Managed distributed data stores at scale on Kubernetes (Kafka, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Redis, PostgreSQL, NATS); led successful migration from self-hosted Redis to AWS ElastiCache to resolve chronic scaling bottlenecks.
Kiratech — Sr. DevOps Engineer (Oct 2019 - Oct 2020)
Remote (Italy)
- Enterprise Cloud & DevOps Consulting: Delivered infrastructure modernization, cloud-native migrations, and platform sizing for 4 Tier-1 banking and fintech clients.
- Kubernetes & GitOps Implementations: Designed and deployed 3 production-ready Kubernetes clusters across 4 environments (dev, integration, pre-prod, prod) using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) and GitOps principles, reducing provisioning cycle times by over 60%.
- Technical Enablement & Training: Linux Foundation Certified Instructor delivering high-impact corporate training and certification bootcamps with classes of 30+ engineers for CKA (Certified Kubernetes Administrator) and CKAD curricula.
Facilitylive — DevOps Engineer / SCM (May 2016 - Oct 2019)
Pavia (Italy)
- Microservices & Kubernetes Architecture: Re-architected the core search engine product from a monolithic platform into a scalable microservices architecture on Kubernetes (vSphere, Spring Cloud, Consul, Prometheus/Grafana), boosting system resilience (limiting failure blast radius to <5% of product capabilities) and throughput.
- Software-Defined Datacenter (SDDC) IaC: Automated on-premise datacenter provisioning using Terraform, Packer, and VMware NSX-T, codifying bare-metal/virtualized infrastructure into repeatable IaC blueprints and improving development velocity by 2x.
- CI/CD Pipelines & Developer Tooling: Built and maintained organization-wide Jenkins CI/CD pipelines and authored custom Python/Go CLI and REST operational tools to streamline developer troubleshooting and reduce incident MTTR by 20%.
- DevOps Evangelism & Production Reliability: Mentored cross-functional development squads of 50+ engineers on cloud-native practices and served on L2 on-call rotations for production Kubernetes clusters.
Early Career — System & Database Administrator (Jun 2007 - May 2016)
Various Companies
Held System Administrator, Software Configuration Manager, and Database Administrator roles across Murphy’s Audio, Fastweb IT, Vodafone Italy, and Tecnobeta S.a.S.
Tech Stack: Linux, Bash, Oracle DB, VMware, vSphere, Unix, Windows Server 2008, Java, .NET, WebSphere, JBoss, Tomcat
Projects
PDH - PagerDuty for Humans (2020 - Present)
- Engineered an open-source Python/FastAPI CLI tool integrating PagerDuty REST APIs to automate rule-based alert triage and reactive incident workflows.
- Adopted across 20+ Sysdig SREs and on-call engineers, reducing incident response friction and alarm MTTR by 25%.
- Actively maintained as an open-source tool with 4 external contributors, 6 forks, and 15 GitHub stars.
Autodoc Operator (2024)
- Authored a Go and Kubebuilder Kubernetes operator that dynamically discovers, merges, and serves unified OpenAPI documentation across deployed services.
- Eliminated documentation drift across 40+ microservices and reduced cross-team API onboarding friction by 50%.
https://github.com/mbovo/autodoc
SDCAdmin Operator (2021)
- Developed a custom Go Kubernetes operator automating GitOps-driven IAM access governance, peer approvals, and privilege reconciliation.
- Slashed administrative access turnaround from hours to a 5-minute audited Git Pull Request while enforcing continuous Zero Trust compliance.
https://github.com/mbovo/sdcadminoper
Education
Università Statale di Milano — Bachelor of Science, Computer Science (2008 - 2011)
Milan, Italy
Certifications
GitOps at Scale — Codefresh (2024)
https://www.credly.com/badges/71da594b-68ae-4c4c-94ad-dfc397e7379d
GitOps Fundamentals — Codefresh (2022)
https://www.credly.com/badges/0b184bcf-53bf-4645-b4e3-3eb0856d3141
Certified Kubernetes Administrator — Linux Foundation (2019 - 2022)
https://www.credly.com/badges/b03be37e-5e02-40e5-bc66-ccde0d81250c
Languages
- Italian — native
- English — fluent
- Spanish — basic