Elia el Lazkani

As a part of the Security Development (SecDev) team, we are responsible for Identity and Access for all users of bol. The team's responsibilities is wide, it starts with the security of the aformentioned platform and extends to developing all the services and features related to these aspects. Without going into too much details, I can list a few aspects of the job: Deveploment in Python, Java and Kotlin of all the required services, Identification and protection against malicious activities, Development and maintenance of ML models and their infrastructure, Implementing a security mindset to everything mentioned previously. If you've used bol, you had to go through us.

As a Tech Lead of teams Insights and CI/CD, a part of my role was working with engineers from both teams on projects over-arching multiple product teams. I ironed out road blocks to help engineers do what they do best; innovate. With a wider view on the overall architecture of the infrastructure and its future vision at bol.com, I was able to help guide engineers make good architectural designs, seamless migrations and an overall good experience for the developers. I promoted best practices and encouraged team members to think outside the box to find new and innovative solutions. I was also a part of the overall infrastructure Tech Leads team; Getafix.

As a member of team Insights, my responsibilities revolved around metrics, monitoring, logging and alerting across bol.com. The team manages a platform as a service for developers to use as a service or as building block. During my time, the team successfully migrated into a new, more scalable, metrics platform. The team was also successful in the migration of the logging platform to the cloud as well as migrating to a new alerting platform.

At Digidentity, I automated a lot of the processes from building OS image templates all the way to automating K3s deployment and management. I built and configured K3s clusters and migrated applications to K3s from Cattle. I built and automated a good base to build automation upon.

As a Linux Application Engineering, I was responsible of maintaining the infrastructure designed for the applications. The responsibilities extended to the deployment pipelines, Kubernetes clusters and application deployment. I helped advice on the best practices and recommended architectural designs to solve infrastructure arising issues.

I joined AWeber as a member of the Platform Support Engineering (PSE) team having wide stretching responsibilities of maintaining the Platform for the developers. During my time, I was an integral member of the team who managed to complete a full datacenter migration followed by a new infrastructure build from the ground up. The new infrastructure was based on the principles of cattle over pets, end to end automation, platform as a service and, of course, twelve factor apps to be deployed in kubernetes.

This role was a continuation of my previous role except as an employee of Ditech. I assumed more responsibilities, like helping other teams with their deployment issues migrating to AWS. I had a lot more freedom and knowledge to architect and build small applications in the cloud and help other teams do so as well.

I was assigned to a special self sufficient team that delivered end to end products. An early adoption of the DevOps philosophy as the company looked into moving into AWS. I was mainly responsible for the operations side of the work in this team. It was also an opportunity for me to help with the development of the product. During my time, I was part of a datacenter migration, where my expertise were used, being a part of the early engineers who were present and had a hand in the original build up.

I joined Ditech in the process of building the company and infrastructure from scratch. I witnessed all the technologies used and how everything was designed by a seasoned but small team of engineers around me. I got to wear many hats and grow rapidly. I was a Linux and Windows systems engineer. I helped automate a lot of the work that was previously done manually. I got my hands full with a lot of the industry standard hardware and software during the build up of the datacenters.