Saad Anees

Senior DevOps and Cloud Engineer with more than 15 years in IT, specialising in designing, building, and running production infrastructure on AWS and Microsoft Azure. Brings extensive contract experience across large, fast-moving enterprises, owning cloud platforms end to end — from initial architecture through build, security hardening, and live operation. Core strengths sit in AWS/Azure container platforms on EKS and ECS, AWS Network Firewall, VPC network design, and large-scale database migrations onto RDS — alongside substantial Azure delivery covering AKS, VMSS, Container Apps, and App Services, secured with Private Endpoints, Key Vault, and Managed Identities.

All infrastructure is delivered as code with Terraform, while Wiz and Infracost are embedded into CI/CD pipelines to keep security posture and cloud spend under continuous control. Equally effective as a hands-on engineer or technical lead: mentoring engineers, partnering with architects, and translating business objectives into workable cloud strategy.

Senior DevOps Engineer Lead - Warner Hotels

(2024-04 - 2026-06)

Served as Senior DevOps Engineer and Technical Lead, reporting directly to the CTO and driving cloud strategy, platform engineering, infrastructure automation, and operational security across AWS and Azure.

• Led greenfield platform builds and complex migrations from on-premises environments to AWS and Azure, performing application discovery, dependency mapping, risk assessments, migration planning, and production cutovers.
• Designed, implemented, and maintained secure, highly available AWS infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code, with a strong emphasis on private networking, least-privilege IAM, encrypted services, and the elimination of hardcoded credentials through managed secrets.
• Built, deployed, and supported containerised applications on Amazon ECS, integrating Application Load Balancers (ALB), Amazon RDS, AWS Certificate Manager (ACM), and secure networking to deliver scalable and resilient production platforms.
• Developed event-driven cloud solutions using AWS Lambda, SNS, SQS, and EventBridge to automate workflows, integrate internal systems, and reduce operational overhead.
• Created reusable Terraform modules and standardised deployment pipelines using GitHub Actions, improving infrastructure consistency, reducing deployment times, and enabling repeatable multi-environment provisioning.
• Strengthened cloud security by implementing continuous infrastructure and application security scanning using Wiz, tfsec, Checkov, and SAST/DAST tooling, ensuring compliance and reducing cloud misconfiguration risks.
• Implemented end-to-end monitoring, logging, and alerting using Amazon CloudWatch to significantly improving operational visibility, incident response, and platform reliability.
• Collaborated closely with solution architects, developers, and technical stakeholders to transform high-level solution designs into secure, production-ready cloud platforms.
• Designed, deployed, and supported secure Azure infrastructure and AKS-based container platforms for internal finance applications, implementing autoscaling, secure ingress, rolling deployments, and high-availability architectures in line with enterprise security and networking standards.
• Deployed secure Azure virtual networks incorporating Private Endpoints, Network Security Groups, Azure Load Balancers, NAT Gateway, and Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) to provide private connectivity, controlled outbound traffic, and resilient application hosting.
• Provisioned and managed Azure SQL Database with secure private connectivity, automated backups, performance tuning, and disaster recovery considerations to support business-critical financial applications.
• Integrated Azure AI Foundry services into internal platforms where required, enabling secure access to AI capabilities while maintaining governance, identity controls, and private network connectivity.
• Automated Azure infrastructure provisioning using Terraform and GitHub Actions, establishing consistent Infrastructure as Code practices across both AWS and Azure environments.
• Implemented Azure monitoring, diagnostics, and alerting using Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, and Grafana to improve operational insight, platform health monitoring, and proactive incident management.
• Worked alongside development teams to modernise legacy finance applications for Azure, improving deployment automation, security posture, scalability, and operational resilience while reducing manual operational effort.

Senior AWS/ DevOps Engineer - Bourne Leisure Ltd

(2021-11 - 2024-04)

Working closely with architects and head of cloud to implement AWS infrastructure for on premises migration

• Provisioned AWS infrastructure using Terraform modules and standalone resources, orchestrated through GitHub Actions pipelines with tfsec and Checkov security scanning and manual approval gates before apply, ensuring safe, auditable infrastructure changes.
• Securing the infrastructure by setting up right security group and NACL's and defining private subnets.
• Designed and implemented a secure bastion host for access to private subnets, restricting EC2 login to users connecting over VPN with valid console access, eliminating direct public exposure of private instances.
• Part of the major on premises databases migration to aws cloud on Oracle and SQL server databases.
• Making changes to RDS Parameter groups and options group upon DBA request to fine tune AWS RDS.
• Creating AWS Cloudwatch alarm and alerts for aws infrastructure such as EC2 instances and RDS.
• Deploying custom frontend application using docker.
• Was also a part of project to deploy AWS EKS cluster for hosting internal applications.

Senior DevOps Engineer - Nominet UK

(2021-08 - 2022-08)

• Responsible for creating aws services like EC2, RDS, IAM roles, S3 bucket policies.
• Responsible for automating whole AWS infrastructure using terraform.
• Also working with senior architects to translate architectural diagrams into terraform.
• Responsible for mentoring new junior DevOps with best practices and on boarding.
• Creating rules in cloud watch for automatic EBS volume snapshots and EC2 state change.
• Working on gitlab pipeline for infrastructure automation.
• Working closely with developers to help them with aws infrastructure requirements.
• Was part of IOS application build and deployment to app store using fastlane.
• Creating VPC and subnets for development environment and making sure traffic in and out of the servers is secure.
• Creating mount point for developers to use S3 as their local drive.
• Creating EBS volumes and then converting them into snapshots to have a backup.

Senior DevOps Engineer/ DevOps Project Lead - IRIS SOFTWARE GROUP

(2019-09 - 2021-07)

Started IRIS as sole DevOps engineer to facilitate current ongoing cloud project

• Creation of new AWS, Jira, Bit Bucket, Teamcity user accounts for new Developers and QA.
• Lead Kubernetes upgrade project and towards successful completion.
• Responsible for Building new pipelines within Teamcity to automate current build and deployments.
• Reviewing everyday pull request by junior DevOps and developers.
• Responsible for implementing security best practices in the form of security groups, NACL's and Kubernetes POD level access using AWS IAM.