Eduard Catalin Dragu

Platform Engineer

Milan, Italy

Experience

Feb 2024 to Present

Platform Engineer · Milan, Italy

Drove the team's roadmap for a platform of ~30 GKE and ~10 AKS clusters run through GitOps, getting dependent work onto neighboring teams' roadmaps
Cut provisioning of new GCP and Azure environments from 1 week to 4 hours with IaC, CI/CD pipelines and repository templates built into teams' delivery workflows
Reduced development environment costs by ~60% with Spot VMs on GKE (on-demand fallback for critical workloads) and scheduled Cloud SQL shutdowns
Led availability and scalability for ~200 GKE applications: PodDisruptionBudgets, anti-affinity and autoscaling (HPA), adopted by application teams and enforced with OPA Gatekeeper
Kubernetes escalation point in the weekly on-call (incident commander or technical lead); wrote the runbooks and break-glass procedures L2 operations use to fix Kubernetes issues alone
Started an inner-source Go toolbox the team uses for routine platform tasks, from certificate requests against the bank's private internal CAs to on-demand startup of lower environments and AI-drafted documentation through a Confluence MCP server
Rolled out Prisma Cloud and CyberArk to application teams and built them into CI/CD pipelines, handling integration and upgrades
Set up backups for all critical PaaS and IaaS services, and secret management with External Secrets Operator on Google Secret Manager and Azure Key Vault
Defined infrastructure SLOs on managed Prometheus and Grafana for GKE and AKS with the observability team, and helped application teams define their own

Mar 2022 to Feb 2024

Cloud Engineer & Cloud Architect · Milan, Italy

Led the migration of ~30 applications to GCP for a major European bank with IaC and managed services (GKE, Cloud SQL, GCS, Memorystore), forwarding audit logs to Splunk for compliance
Reduced 5xx errors and failures under load by ~30% by setting GKE standards across multiple domains: autoscaling (HPA), right-sized resource requests, tuned probes
Introduced chaos engineering with Chaos Mesh to expose design gaps in applications moving from mainframe and VMware to GKE, using real failures to make the case for PodDisruptionBudgets and anti-affinity
Contributed to a multi-region disaster recovery plan with failover for zonal and regional outages
Mentored and onboarded 8 engineers
Technical point of contact for client management, unblocking deployment issues that put delivery deadlines at risk

May 2020 to Mar 2022

System Engineer · Milan, Italy

Migrated ~20 legacy on-premises applications to Azure and GCP (re-platformed or rebuilt), moving ~10 of them from VMs to cloud-native microservices on managed PaaS
Saved ~30% on database and VM costs by right-sizing instances, with no loss in performance
Built standard deployment patterns for core Azure and GCP services (App Engine, Cloud SQL, Memorystore, VMs) that met security and reliability requirements by default

Sep 2017 to Apr 2020

Infrastructure Specialist · Brunello, Italy

Automated patch management for ~8,000 systems (~5,000 Windows, ~3,000 Linux) with WSUS and Spacewalk
Rolled out Commvault disaster recovery copies for 150+ customers, covering 10,000+ VMs
Led a European customer's infrastructure expansion (~40 new physical servers) and several vSphere upgrades across ESXi hosts and vCenters
Deployed 7 new vSphere clusters across company data centers

Cloud

GCPAzureAWS

Containers & Orchestration

Kubernetes (GKE, AKS)Docker

IaC & GitOps

TerraformFluxCD

Policy & Security

OPA GatekeeperExternal Secrets OperatorPrisma CloudCyberArk

Observability & Reliability

PrometheusGrafanaSplunkChaos Mesh

Practices

Platform EngineeringSREFinOps

CI/CD

JenkinsGitLabGitHub

Languages

GoPythonBash

Systems

LinuxVMware vSphere

High school diploma in Computer Science

Italy · 2012 to 2017