About
I'm Hirak.
I’m interested in the infrastructure behind software: how applications are built, deployed, scaled, observed and recovered when something goes wrong. My current focus is Kubernetes, platform engineering, cloud infrastructure and the systems required to operate AI workloads.
Background
My route into engineering has not been completely linear.
I originally studied business and marketing before moving into computer science and software infrastructure. That change pushed me toward a part of computing I found particularly interesting: not only writing an application, but understanding everything required to make that application run reliably.
- Linux: the foundation — understanding the operating system and how things work under the hood.
- Networking: understanding how systems communicate.
- Containers: packaging applications and their dependencies.
- Kubernetes: orchestrating and managing containers at scale.
- Cloud: running and scaling applications in the cloud.
- Infrastructure as code: defining and managing infrastructure through code.
- CI/CD: automating build, test and deployment pipelines.
- Observability: monitoring, logging and understanding system behaviour.
- Platform engineering: bringing everything together to build reliable, scalable systems.
I completed an MSc in Computer Science at the University of Sussex, where my dissertation explored LLM-assisted log analysis for Kubernetes incident response.
Focus
What I’m focused on
Kubernetes & Platform Engineering
Building platforms that make application deployment repeatable, observable and reliable.
Cloud Infrastructure
Understanding the systems beneath managed services rather than treating cloud resources as isolated products.
Reliability
Testing how systems behave during resource pressure, dependency failure, bad deployments and infrastructure failures.
AI Infrastructure
Exploring the infrastructure required to serve AI applications efficiently — inference serving, routing, caching, observability and cost.
Technologies
Tools I work with
- Infrastructure
- Kubernetes · Docker · Terraform · Ansible · Helm · Argo CD
- Cloud
- AWS · EKS · EC2 · ECR · RDS · S3 · VPC · IAM
- Delivery
- GitHub Actions · Jenkins · GitOps
- Observability
- Prometheus · Grafana · Loki · OpenTelemetry
- Development
- Python · FastAPI · JavaScript · React · PostgreSQL · Redis
- AI Infrastructure
- LLM APIs · vLLM · RAG · pgvector
Certifications
CNCF Kubestronaut
Kubernetes and cloud-native certification milestone covering the CNCF Kubernetes certification path.
Homelab
Somewhere to break things on purpose
I also maintain a small environment for infrastructure experiments. It gives me somewhere to test infrastructure, intentionally break things and investigate behaviour without treating every experiment as a cloud bill.
MacBook
Control / Development Interface
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1 Gbit Network
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AI Node Infra Node
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Coding Docker
Agents Kubernetes
Builds Terraform
Ansible
Jenkins
Argo CD
Prometheus
GrafanaContact
Let’s talk.
If you want to discuss Kubernetes, platform engineering, cloud infrastructure, AI systems, an interesting engineering problem, or an opportunity to work together, feel free to reach out.