Roman Ekimov

Professional Experience

DevOps Lead — Finharbor

January 2026 – Present

Fintech company providing global payment and financial infrastructure

Function Ownership & Technical Leadership: End-to-end owner of the DevOps & infrastructure function — technical roadmap, sprint planning, and prioritization — leading infrastructure workstreams together with the backend, security, and product teams; onboarded and mentored a DevOps engineer and codified runbooks, on-call, and IaC standards so practices outlive individuals.
Infrastructure Strategy & Architecture: Driving infrastructure architecture for fintech microservices, ensuring high availability, disaster recovery, and compliance readiness.
Flagship Delivery — Asterium (Uzbekistan): Led the infrastructure workstream behind the hybrid neobank & digital-asset platform delivered for Asterium: environment topology, regional hosting and data residency, capacity planning, and production go-live readiness across the platform's full IT estate — core banking, card issuing, the exchange, and KYC/AML services — under Uzbekistan's NAPP-regulated framework.
PCI DSS & Security Governance: Owning the infrastructure side of PCI DSS compliance — maintaining certified scope and network segmentation, secret & key management (HashiCorp Vault / OpenBao), centralized audit logging, periodic access reviews, and evidence collection for annual re-certification audits.
FinOps & Cost Reduction: Cut monthly cloud spend by ~30% — imported every pre-existing cloud resource into Terraform state to get complete spend visibility, then decommissioned orphaned resources, right-sized Kubernetes node pools, and trimmed log ingestion and retention.
Client & Partner Engagement: Directly communicating with enterprise clients and partners regarding infrastructure integrations, security requirements, disaster recovery, and SLA guarantees.
AI-Assisted Delivery: Adopted AI coding agents into day-to-day infrastructure work — IaC changes, pipeline scaffolding, runbook and documentation drafts — to shorten delivery cycles on routine tasks; contributing to an internal initiative building a fleet of agents wired into the task tracker to pick up tickets and prepare changes for human review.
Process Standardization: Standardizing GitOps, CI/CD, and IaC practices across engineering squads to accelerate product release velocity and ensure deployment consistency.
Incident & SRE Governance: Establishing on-call schedules, incident response protocols, and postmortem workflows to maintain high reliability.

DevOps Engineer — Finharbor

May 2024 – December 2025

Fintech company providing global payment and financial infrastructure

Multi-Cloud & Hybrid Infrastructure: Designed, deployed, and scaled multi-cloud infrastructure across Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Servercore, and DigitalOcean, alongside bare-metal and VM environments.
Infrastructure as Code: Implemented and managed IaC using Terraform, OpenTofu, Helm, ArgoCD, Ansible, and Packer for fintech microservices.
CI/CD & GitOps: Built automated CI/CD pipelines in GitLab CI and GitOps workflows via ArgoCD, creating Helm charts to deploy polyglot microservices (Java, Kotlin, JavaScript/TypeScript, Rust, Go) into cloud Kubernetes (GKE) clusters.
Asterium Platform Build-Out (Uzbekistan): Delivered the cloud infrastructure for the Asterium hybrid neobank & digital-asset platform — provisioned multi-environment Kubernetes landing zones with Terraform, Helm, and ArgoCD, plus CI/CD pipelines, secret management, and observability for the platform's entire service estate — core banking, card issuing, exchange, and KYC/AML/KYT microservices.
PCI DSS Compliance: Participated in the PCI DSS audit and certification process: enforced infrastructure security controls, network isolation, audit logging, and secret management using HashiCorp Vault / OpenBao.
Observability & SRE: Designed and maintained comprehensive observability and monitoring stacks (Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics, Grafana), implementing SRE practices to ensure 99.99% uptime for core financial services.
Data Stores & Streaming: Managed and tuned data stores and streaming platforms including PostgreSQL, Redis, and Apache Kafka for low-latency transaction processing.

DevOps Engineer (Fintech Team) — Blockchain Family

November 2022 – April 2024

Blockchain integrations and decentralized fintech infrastructure

Cloud & Container Infrastructure: Managed and scaled GCP cloud infrastructure and Docker Compose environments across bare-metal and VM platforms.
IaC & Automation: Developed and maintained IaC for fintech and blockchain projects in GCP using Terraform, Ansible, and Packer.
CI/CD Pipelines: Engineered GitLab CI pipelines and Helm charts to deploy Java, Rust, and Go microservices to cloud Kubernetes (GKE) clusters.
Decentralized Messaging: Implemented DevOps practices, containerization, and deployment automation for a secure messaging platform based on the Matrix protocol.
Reliability & SRE: Established infrastructure observability and SRE practices to ensure service stability, fault tolerance, and high availability.

DevOps Engineer / SRE — Tinkoff Bank

June 2021 – October 2022

TOP-10 Bank & Fintech Ecosystem (Processing Systems Infrastructure Team)

Core Banking Infrastructure: Maintained and optimized enterprise Linux (RHEL, CentOS, Ubuntu) infrastructure supporting mission-critical 24/7 payment processing.
Anti-Fraud Tooling in Go: Developed custom monitoring, diagnostic, and automation utilities in Go (Golang) for the bank's anti-fraud unit — exporting processing-system metrics and alerting signals that helped analysts spot and block fraudulent activity earlier, alongside general banking infrastructure operations.
Observability as Code: Implemented IaC for enterprise observability and logging stacks (Prometheus, ELK Stack, Zabbix).
CI/CD & Orchestration: Built CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI, Jenkins) and deployment manifests (Kustomize, Helm) for Java, Rust, and Go applications across on-premise and cloud Kubernetes / Docker Swarm clusters (bare-metal, VMs, AWS).
Acting Team Lead & Mentoring: Deputized for the team lead of the processing-systems infrastructure team during absences — running daily priorities and task assignment, coordinating on-call coverage and incident escalation, and representing the team in cross-department change reviews; onboarding mentor for a newly joined engineer (environment ramp-up, runbooks, first on-call rotations).
SRE & 24/7 Operations: Served as an SRE ensuring 24/7 reliability and uptime of high-load transaction processing systems (on-call rotations, SLA/SLO tracking, incident troubleshooting, and root cause postmortems).

Infrastructure Engineer — EXANTE

December 2018 – May 2021

Global Investment Company (OPS Team)

Centralized Logging: Designed and deployed a high-availability centralized logging platform (Elasticsearch + Graylog + Fluentd) with HAProxy load balancing across all company services and servers.
Bare-Metal Kubernetes: Built and managed an on-premise Kubernetes cluster on bare-metal hardware for core trading and internal systems.
CI/CD Modernization: Migrated legacy pipelines from Jenkins to GitLab CI, improving build efficiency and deployment consistency.
Configuration as Code: Automated server provisioning and maintenance across Debian/Ubuntu fleets using Chef.
HR Automation: Automated HR onboarding and offboarding workflows with custom integrations between BambooHR and Google Workspace.
Exchange Connectivity: Supported low-latency market connectivity tools and trading infrastructure (FIX protocol, trading terminals) connected to major global exchanges (NYSE, NASDAQ, LSE).
Acting Team Lead: Stood in as acting lead of the Operations (OPS) team during the team lead's absences — owning sprint priorities, task distribution, incident response, and infrastructure maintenance for the duration.

IT Support & Network Engineer — Center for Pedagogical Excellence

September 2011 – November 2018

IT & Network Operations Team

Systems & Workstations: Administered Linux and Windows servers along with all organizational workstations (Windows, macOS).
Campus Network (NOC): Configured and maintained Cisco, MikroTik, Extreme Networks, and HP networking hardware; established site-to-site connectivity across three campus buildings in Moscow.
Automated Provisioning: Built an automated mass-provisioning system for rapid OS deployment and software configuration across hundreds of laptops for academic olympiads and training sessions.
Monitoring Stack: Implemented infrastructure-wide monitoring and dashboards using Observium, InfluxDB, Telegraf, and Grafana.