Liche Moodley

DevOps Engineer with +5.5 years of deep, hands-on experience with AWS cloud. Formerly at AWS, and currently engineering cloud solutions at Ozow, a prominent South African payments provider. Specialized in Serverless computing, holding an AWS Lambda SME accreditation.

Experienced in building highly available, highly scalable, fault-tolerant, and secure cloud systems. Passionate about leveraging automation to streamline infrastructure tasks and build robust CI/CD pipelines. I develop reusable Terraform modules to drive consistency, while championing security, compliance and cost optimizations across environments.

DevOps Engineer at Ozow (2024-05 – Present)

• Developed reusable Terraform modules to drive consistency and best practices across projects.
• Improved our entire existing Payments ecosystem as follows: Decoupled and refactored the Terraform to enforce modularisation. Designed and built new pipelines to facilitate safer, easier and seamless deployments.
• Designed and implemented cloud infrastructure architectures by assessing workload requirements and determining the most appropriate compute model (AWS Lambda or Amazon ECS) based on Use Case fit.
• Architected and implemented Deployment strategies for complex applications across Dev, Staging and Production environments.
• Built, maintained and iteratively improved CI/CD pipelines in TeamCity to streamline and accelerate both application and infrastructure deployments.
• Supported Build and Release processes by: Being present for application code deployments. Assisting with deploying application code to existing infrastructure. Ensuring that the application code can run successfully on the infrastructure. Ensuring that there are no blockers from an infrastructure perspective.
• Exposure to Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) by building DataDog dashboards that: Provide real-time observability into application performance and infrastructure health. Consolidate application logs, CloudWatch metrics and key operational statistics into a centralized view. Facilitate the proactive detection of anomalous trends, performance bottlenecks and emerging issues before they impact service reliability.
• Participated in an on-call rotation to proactively respond to DataDog alerts.
• Exposure to Incident Management by: Generated DataDog incident reports to document and analyze Production issues related to infrastructure. Conducted RCA for Production incidents, isolating infrastructure-related issues as the underlying cause. Implemented corrective measures to improve system reliability and reduce recurring incidents.
• Performed manual patching of EC2 instances to comply with PCI DSS requirements.
• Developed tools to automate repetitive operational tasks using Python and Bash.
• Developed alerting and notification tools to provide visibility into deployments and operational events.
• Led knowledge sharing sessions to upskill Developers on infrastructure fundamentals and best practices.
• Became a key point of contact for Infrastructure at Ozow. Built strong working relationships across the Engineering team, fostering close collaboration and alignment between Development and Infrastructure.
• Gained working knowledge of PostgreSQL to assist Developers with fine-tuning their SQL queries. This was to improve Database performance and ensure optimal resource consumption on Amazon RDS.
• Participated in technical interviews for DevOps roles as part of the hiring process.
• Supported the onboarding, upskilling and mentoring of new Infrastructure team members.
• Proactively identified inefficiences in existing infrastructure and formulated strategic solutions to optimize and enhance systems, with a strong focus on cost reduction and operational excellence.
• Performed AWS cost audits across selected services to analyze usage and identify opportunities for cost savings through right-sizing.
• Drove cost optimization initiatives by decommissioning unused resources, analyzing usage, rightsizing infrastructure and implementing optimal controls for scaling activities.
• Proactively addressed compliance requirements and mitigated security vulnerabilities to uphold infrastructure integrity and regulatory standards (PCI DSS).
• Implemented security best practices across environments.
• Partenered with external auditors and stakeholders to support PCI DSS audits.
• Collected, organized and presented infrastructure evidence to demonstrate adherence to PCI DSS requirements.

Cloud Support Engineer I at Amazon Web Services (2020-11 – 2024-03)

• Apply advanced troubleshooting techniques to provide unique solutions tailored to customer Use Cases.
• Work on critical, highly complex customer cases spanning multiple AWS services.
• Collaborate with AWS service teams to reproduce and resolve edge cases.
• Drive customer communication during critical events.
• Drive projects to improve the customers' Technical Support experience.
• Collaborate with internal AWS teams to enhance Cloud services and internal tooling.
• Review and update the AWS documentation and Knowledge Centre articles.
• Publish internal articles and training videos for the Builder community.
• Coach and mentor new recruits, as well as aspiring AWS Lambda SME candidates.
• Conduct trainings for new recruits, as well as aspiring AWS Lambda SME candidates.
• Participate in AWS Lambda SME Bootcamps.
• Interview potential CSE (Cloud Support Engineer) and CSA (Cloud Support Associate) candidates.
• Architect cloud systems based on the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

BSc in Computer Science & IT – University of KwaZulu-Natal (2016 – 2019)