Jakub Hovorka

Manage and optimize Kubernetes workloads, CI/CD pipelines, and Helm charts, working closely with development teams to troubleshoot production issues. Maintain Azure infrastructure with Terraform and operate the observability and logging stack (Prometheus, Thanos, Grafana, Loki, Tempo, Alloy). Onboard and maintain developer and data-engineering tooling with SSO integration, scalable deployments, and lifecycle management. Also support and extend data-platform tooling for Project Nightingale, integrating Argo Workflows, Spark, Trino, Nessie, and JupyterHub.

• Unified and standardized all deployment Helm charts across the organization, improving maintainability, consistency, and onboarding speed for engineering teams.
• Led the org-wide migration from Bitbucket Pipelines to ArgoCD, then stabilized the platform to reliably deploy 150+ applications across 30 clusters — including educating teams on GitOps workflows.
• Revitalized the observability stack (Prometheus, Thanos, Grafana), consolidated two legacy ELK Stack environments into one, and later collaborated with the platform team on migrating logging to Loki.
• Took ownership of the infrastructure/DevOps track for Project Nightingale — integrating Argo Workflows/Events, Spark, Trino, Nessie, RabbitMQ, MinIO, DataHub, and JupyterHub, designing event-driven workflows and custom Python tooling for Spark-on-Kubernetes.
• Led the migration from Ingress NGINX to Envoy Gateway as part of an org-wide move to Gateway API, improving reliability, flexibility, and security of traffic management.
• Collaborated with the platform team on adopting Talos for production on-premise environments (Proxmox, OpenStack), and on onboarding Cilium and Kyverno across environments.

Managed and supported deployments of containerized banking and finance applications on Kubernetes using GitLab CI/CD, Helm, and ArgoCD, working with developers to resolve issues, perform upgrades, and improve deployment workflows across Docker, Kubernetes, Git, Bash, SQL, Rancher, and Azure.

• Streamlined Kubernetes deployment workflows across multiple client projects, improving release consistency and reducing deployment time.
• Improved GitLab CI/CD pipeline reliability by troubleshooting build issues and optimizing pipeline stages.
• Enhanced developer productivity with clearer deployment documentation and hands-on guidance in Helm, ArgoCD, and Kubernetes fundamentals.
• Supported the adoption of ArgoCD for selected projects, contributing to smoother GitOps-driven deployments.

Worked as a full-stack developer on Paradrop, a cybersecurity asset-management tool — building backend REST APIs and database operations in Python Flask, a vanilla JS/Bootstrap frontend, and containerized deployments to DigitalOcean via GitHub Actions.

• Designed and implemented core backend functionality in Flask, improving data access reliability and API performance.
• Built and refined user-facing features in JavaScript/Bootstrap for a cleaner, more intuitive UI.
• Introduced Docker containerization and a stable GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline, reducing deployment overhead.
• Played a key role in delivering a fully functional, production-ready cybersecurity tool used by early customers.

• Built an enterprise-like Kubernetes homelab on Proxmox to develop and validate DevOps practices in a controlled environment.
• Automated infrastructure provisioning with Terraform (VMs, Talos/K3s clusters, applications) and Ansible (K3s setup, HAProxy configuration).
• Implemented a GitOps workflow with GitLab CI/CD and ArgoCD for automated cluster bootstrapping, CRD deployment, and application management.
• Deployed and maintained cert-manager, MetalLB, Envoy Gateway, Loki, Prometheus, Harbor, Authentik, and MinIO.
• Built custom Docker images through reusable CI pipelines.
• Serves as a hands-on environment for testing new technologies — documented in the posts on this blog.

The highest level of recognition awarded by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), earned by completing all 16 CNCF and Linux Foundation certifications across the Kubernetes and cloud-native ecosystem.

Specialized IT curriculum covering computer science theory, network protocols and configuration, operating systems, system administration, database fundamentals, and practical hardware assembly.