Vulco Viljoen

DevOps and Security Engineer with over 13 years of experience building and operating scalable, reliable infrastructure in SaaS and regulated environments. I specialize in AWS cloud infrastructure, Infrastructure as Code, and CI/CD pipeline automation with security integrated from the start. At Allstate I led platform automation, drove SRE adoption, built secure delivery pipelines (SecureFlow), and significantly improved system reliability and observability.

I have hands-on experience operating production systems, reducing mean time to recovery, and embedding compliance-aligned practices. I completed my CISSP in June 2026 and enjoy mentoring teams while delivering resilient platforms that teams can trust.

Senior Product Engineer / DevSecOps Specialist at Allstate Canada (2025-02 – 2026-02)

• Led the design and automation of Octopus Deploy across Allstate's CI/CD landscape, supporting ~50 development teams with a focus on scalability, security, and developer experience.
• Built a certificate lifecycle automation framework on AWS that reduced manual renewal work by ~70% and eliminated expiry-related production incidents through proactive monitoring and renewal.
• Served as product-engineering lead for SecureFlow, a secure CI/CD platform that embeds compliance guardrails, security scanning, and policy enforcement directly into delivery pipelines.
• Drove SRE adoption by implementing observability dashboards, automated incident response playbooks, and structured post-mortems. This work reduced mean time to recovery by ~40% across critical platforms.
• Coordinated vulnerability management across enterprise applications and integrated automated scanning into CI/CD pipelines, reducing average remediation time from two weeks to approximately three days.
• Mentored engineers on DevSecOps practices, secure pipeline design, and operational discipline. Focused on building team capability and encouraging ownership of production systems.

Senior DevOps Specialist at Allstate Canada (2021-10 – 2025-01)

• Designed and implemented a high-availability architecture for Octopus Deploy across lower and production environments, achieving ~99.9% uptime with documented and regularly tested failover and disaster recovery procedures.
• Built unified CI/CD pipelines integrating GitHub, Jenkins, Artifactory, and SonarQube with security scanning and quality gates, enabling teams to deploy more frequently with greater confidence.
• Authored comprehensive SOPs and runbooks for platform operations, upgrades, and incident response, improving consistency and reducing reliance on tribal knowledge.
• Led onboarding and training for 15+ teams on platform tooling, access management, and production deployment practices, improving consistency and operational readiness.

Senior DevOps Engineer at Kurtosys Systems (2021-01 – 2021-07)

DevOps Engineer at Kurtosys Systems (2017-03 – 2021-01)

Built and operated AWS and OpenStack infrastructure for financial services clients in a regulated environment, with strong emphasis on uptime, auditability, and security posture.

• Implemented monitoring and alerting with Nagios and Zabbix that reduced false-positive noise by ~60%, improving signal quality for on-call engineers.
• Drove log aggregation and observability using Graylog and ELK, delivering actionable dashboards that reduced average troubleshooting time by roughly a third.
• Automated infrastructure tasks by converting legacy scripts into Ansible playbooks and Puppet manifests, improving deployment repeatability and saving significant manual effort.

Infrastructure Engineer at Kurtosys Systems (2016-10 – 2017-03)

• Maintained Linux server security baselines through patching and hardening, reducing vulnerability exposure in production environments.
• Authored incident response playbooks and implemented automated log retention and backup strategies, improving operational consistency and reducing recovery time objectives.

Integration Specialist and Services Consultant at Marshall Technologies / Sanlam Head Office (2013-11 – 2016-10)

Administered enterprise IAM solutions (IBM Tivoli) for over 2,500 users in a regulated financial services environment, managing role-based access, identity lifecycles, and audit-aligned processes across multiple business units.

Earlier Infrastructure and Consulting Experience at Various (2004 – 2013)

Provided infrastructure support, monitoring, patching, and network design for small-to-medium business and telco environments, building foundational experience in reliable system operations.

Full-Stack Developer and Security Architect at Ashkonaa Immigration CRM (2026 – Present)

SaaS Platform

• Designed and implemented comprehensive RBAC across six permission tiers with least-privilege principles, secure authentication (email + Google OAuth), and granular data visibility controls for a multi-tenant SaaS platform.
• Built secure document management with strict validation, encryption, and audit logging to protect sensitive client data while maintaining compliance readiness.
• Applied secure development practices across React + Firebase stack, including data protection, access governance, and security guardrails for a production healthcare-adjacent SaaS environment.