Zhen Karaev
ZHEN
KARAEV
DevOps / SRE Engineer | 6+ Years | AWS · Kubernetes · Terraform · CI/CD · Autonomous AI Agents
☁ AWS Certified SAA ⬡ HashiCorp Terraform ◎ Wells Fargo · Chicago ✦ Open to Work
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AWSKubernetesTerraformArgoCDJenkinsGitHub ActionsDockerPrometheusGrafanaELK StackSageMakerBedrockOpenAI APIAnsiblePython · BashHelmEKSCI/CD AWSKubernetesTerraformArgoCDJenkinsGitHub ActionsDockerPrometheusGrafanaELK StackSageMakerBedrockOpenAI APIAnsiblePython · BashHelmEKSCI/CD

THIS IS ME

Hi, I'm Zhen 👋

I'm a Senior DevOps / SRE Engineer based in Chicago, IL with 6+ years of experience designing, automating, and scaling cloud-native infrastructure. I spend my days at Wells Fargo building enterprise-grade platforms on AWS — and making sure they stay up.

My work spans the full DevOps lifecycle: infrastructure as code with Terraform, container orchestration with Kubernetes and EKS, GitOps workflows with ArgoCD, and observability stacks with Prometheus and Grafana. I believe in automating everything that can be automated.

What sets me apart is hands-on experience with AI/ML infrastructure — deploying ML workloads on AWS SageMaker and Bedrock, integrating OpenAI APIs, and building the DevOps foundation for AI-powered products at enterprise scale in a regulated financial environment.

I relocated from Kyrgyzstan to the United States and built my career in tech from the ground up — that drive and resilience shapes how I approach every challenge.

Key Achievements & Highlights
  • Senior DevOps Engineer at Wells Fargo — enterprise AWS infrastructure at scale
  • AI/ML Infrastructure — SageMaker, Bedrock & OpenAI API in production at a financial institution
  • Co-founded Octopus AI — built full cloud infrastructure for a TMS platform from scratch
  • Previously at The Home Depot — Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD at retail scale
  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate (2025)
  • HashiCorp Certified Terraform Associate (2026)
  • Relocated from Kyrgyzstan 🇰🇬 to the US 🇺🇸 — built a tech career from scratch
AWS Solutions Architect
Associate · Amazon Web Services · 2025
Terraform Associate
HashiCorp · 2026

QUOTES I LIVE BY