Mandela Muithi

Mandela Muithi
Site Reliability & DevOps Engineer

I design, automate, and operate the infrastructure that production systems depend on — Kubernetes clusters, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud environments built for reliability at scale. Software engineering foundation, infrastructure-first focus.

About

I'm an engineer focused on building systems that stay up, recover fast, and scale predictably. My work sits at the intersection of infrastructure, automation, and production engineering — operating Kubernetes clusters on AWS, codifying environments with Terraform, and shipping services through hardened CI/CD pipelines.

I think in terms of failure modes, blast radius, and recovery paths. I treat manual work as a bug, observability as a first-class feature, and incident response as a craft. Alongside infrastructure, I build product features and internal tooling — which keeps me close to the engineers using the platforms I run.

I work across both employed and independent engineering contexts, including entrepreneurial projects where I own systems end-to-end: from cluster provisioning to deployment automation to production debugging at 2 AM.

Work Experience

Where I've operated production systems and built reliability into them.

Systems and Cloud Solutions Architect

June 2022 — Present
ICIPE — International Centre of Insect Physiology and EcologyNairobi, Kenya

SRE and platform engineering across ICIPE's cloud and Kubernetes systems — production cluster operations, GitOps delivery with ArgoCD (App-of-Apps) and Flux on adjacent projects, Terraform IaC, GitHub Actions CI/CD, and satellite-data pipelines (COGs on S3, indexed via Open Data Cube, processed by Argo Workflows). I also ship application code on the platforms I run. Vector Atlas is one open-source example I can point to publicly.

Read full breakdown →Live platformicipe-official/vectoratlas-software-codeicipe-official/VA-Cube-Configs

Core Skills

Grouped by where the work happens — cloud and cluster, pipeline and delivery, signal and response, automation and product, data and state.

Cloud & Infrastructure

Production cluster operation, multi-cloud IaC, and the systems that keep workloads running.

  • Kubernetes

    Production clusters, workloads, debugging

  • Terraform

    Multi-cloud IaC, modules, state management

  • AWS

    EKS, EC2, RDS, S3, IAM, networking

  • Linux

    Sysadmin, performance tuning, troubleshooting

DevOps & CI/CD

Pipelines and delivery infrastructure for shipping safely, frequently, and reversibly.

  • GitHub Actions

    Reusable workflows, deployment gates

  • ArgoCD

    Primary GitOps controller — App-of-Apps pattern

  • Flux

    GitOps reconciliation on additional projects

  • Argo Workflows

    Job orchestration for data pipelines on K8s

  • Docker

    Hardened images, multi-stage builds

  • Helm

    Templated K8s releases and rollouts

  • Nginx

    Ingress, reverse proxy, TLS termination

  • Traefik

    Dynamic routing, service discovery

SRE & Observability

The signals, runbooks, and post-incident learning loops that keep production honest.

  • Prometheus

    Metrics, SLOs, alerting

  • Grafana

    Dashboards, visual triage

Programming & Automation

Languages and tooling I use to automate operations and ship product features when needed.

  • Python

    Automation, internal services, glue

  • Bash

    Ops scripting, runbooks, CI shims

  • TypeScript

    Internal tools and product features

  • Next.js

    Dashboards and product surfaces

Geospatial & Earth Observation

Satellite imagery pipelines — COGs on S3, indexed in place with ODC, processed on Kubernetes, served through OGC web services.

  • Open Data Cube (ODC)

    In-place indexing of COGs on S3 with STAC metadata

  • Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFs

    Streamed satellite imagery on S3, no bulk transfer

  • GeoServer

    OGC web services (WMS/WFS/WCS) for processed layers

  • GDAL / Rasterio

    Geospatial format conversion and raster processing

Data & Systems Engineering

Stateful systems — backed up, replicated, and recoverable.

  • PostgreSQL / PostGIS

    Relational and geospatial workloads

Key Strengths

The SRE mindset I bring to every system I touch.

Reliability Engineering

Design for failure first. Assume every component can and will fail, and reduce blast radius accordingly — redundancy, isolation, graceful degradation.

Incident Response & Debugging

Calm under pressure, structured triage, post-incident learning over blame. Production debugging across distributed systems and stateful workloads.

Automation-First Thinking

If it has been done twice manually, it should be a script. If it has been scripted twice, it should be a pipeline. Toil is a bug, not a workflow.

Scalability & System Design

Capacity, latency, and consistency tradeoffs evaluated up front, not patched in later. Operational empathy baked into the platforms I build.

Certifications

Verified credentials in cloud and Kubernetes.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate

Amazon Web Services

completed

Designing resilient, cost-optimized AWS architectures across compute, storage, and networking.

Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate (KCNA)

CNCF / Linux Foundation

completed

Foundational knowledge of Kubernetes, cloud-native architecture, and the CNCF ecosystem.

Projects

Production systems, internal tooling, and independent engineering work — framed by problem, architecture, and measurable impact.

Projects coming soon
Selected SRE, DevOps, and platform engineering projects will be published here — framed by problem, architecture, contribution, and measurable impact.

About Me

Strive for excellence

    2021

    Started Snakebite Diagnosis Project

    2022

    Graduated with BSc. Computer Technology, JKUAT

    2022

    Joined ICIPE as Systems and Cloud Solutions Architect

    2024

    Earned AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate

    2025

    Earned Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate (KCNA)

Career Positioning

I'm building a career around the discipline of keeping production systems reliable, observable, and operable at scale. My focus is SRE and DevOps engineering — owning the path from infrastructure code to deployed workload to production incident — with a working knowledge of platform engineering and product development that lets me collaborate fluently with the engineering teams running on top of what I build.

I'm most effective in environments that value automation, post-incident learning, and pragmatic system design over heroics. Open to SRE, DevOps, and Platform Engineer roles in teams that take reliability seriously.

Engineering the Future, One Byte at a Time

Operational100.00% / 30d
Deployed main@8c86bfc