Mikhail Kirgizov

Senior Systems Engineer with 20+ years of experience designing, deploying, and operating complex Linux-based infrastructure at scale. Deep expertise in high-availability architecture, server operations, database cluster management, containerization, and system reliability. Comfortable with both bare-metal and virtualized environments (VMware, Proxmox, KVM), as well as cloud platforms (AWS, GCP).

Hands-on experience supporting 500+ server environments, multi-cluster databases, and high-load web systems. US Green Card holder. Open to remote and Cleveland, OH area roles.

Systems Engineer at SecureData (2025-02 – 2026-03)

Manage hybrid Linux/Windows server infrastructure supporting mission-critical data recovery operations, ensuring high availability and data integrity.

• Administer VMware and Proxmox virtualization platforms hosting isolated, secure processing environments.
• Refactored Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) to automate NOC operations and standardize resource provisioning.
• Implemented full observability stack (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK) enabling proactive monitoring and rapid incident response.
• Configured and maintain secure network environments: VLAN segmentation, VPN access, firewall rules, and routing.
• Perform Linux security hardening, user access management, and backup/recovery operations.
• Provide Tier-3 infrastructure support and own technical documentation for cross-functional teams.

Systems / Infrastructure Engineer (Contract) at Careerist (2024-02 – 2025-01)

• Designed and deployed scalable cloud infrastructure on GCP for a SaaS education platform.
• Deployed and operated Kubernetes (RKE2) cluster for containerized production workloads.
• Provisioned infrastructure with Terraform; built CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions.
• Set up full monitoring stack (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK) and authored technical documentation for engineering teams.

Senior Devops Engineer at UFS-Online (2010-03 – 2024-07)

Designed and operated Linux-based infrastructure for high-load production web systems across 500+ servers, achieving 99.9%+ uptime.

• Deployed and managed PostgreSQL HA clusters using Patroni with automatic failover; configured and maintained MSSQL Mirroring for Windows-based workloads.
• Built and maintained MongoDB replica sets, Redis caching clusters, Apache Kafka clusters, and RabbitMQ clusters for distributed application workloads.
• Deployed and operate production RKE2 Kubernetes clusters — 5 control-plane nodes (HA etcd), 3 worker nodes on Proxmox; managing full migration from Docker Swarm to Kubernetes with zero downtime.
• Maintained complete CI/CD infrastructure using TeamCity, Bitbucket, Jenkins, and Nexus — supporting application builds and deployments for development teams.
• Administered Atlassian product suite (Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket) for 100+ internal users.
• Configured Nginx for load balancing, reverse proxy, and SSL termination across high-traffic web clusters.
• Built and maintained full observability stack: Prometheus metrics, Grafana dashboards, Alertmanager notification routing, ELK log pipelines.
• Designed and maintained secure network architecture: VLAN isolation, VPN, firewall rules, DNS management.
• Performed regular hardware diagnostics, server maintenance, and troubleshooting across the full data center stack.
• Automated repetitive operations using Ansible playbooks and Bash scripts, reducing manual overhead significantly.

Master of Science in Engineering – Moscow State Textile University (1991 – 1996)