KOBINA T. TURKSON
Stafford,VA
Summary
Dynamic and results-driven Cloud Engineer with extensive experience in managing and optimizing cloud infrastructure, specializing in enhancing system reliability and streamlining operations to align with business objectives. Proven history of improving reliability, strengthening security postures, and reducing operational costs for mission-critical systems underscores a commitment to excellence. Passionate about collaboration with customers and team members to develop and implement innovative technical solutions that address complex challenges. Prepared to leverage expertise in a fast-paced environment to drive impactful results.
Overview
12
12
years of professional experience
Work History
Principal Cloud Operations Engineer
New Sun Road
Richmond, CA
11.2023 - Current
- Architected, deployed, and operated private Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters across development, staging, and production environments.
- Implemented GitOps-based delivery using ArgoCD and Helm, reducing configuration drift and improving deployment consistency across environments by over 40%.
- Designed and maintained an observability platform using Prometheus, Grafana, and Azure Monitor, supporting tens of millions of metrics per day.
- Authored and tuned 30+ Azure Monitor alerts using KQL, reducing alert noise by approximately 35%.
- Led monitoring and logging cost-optimization initiatives, reducing Azure Log Analytics ingestion costs by an estimated 25–40%.
- Implemented Azure Workload Identity (OIDC) and Kubernetes RBAC best practices, eliminating static secrets and significantly improving security posture.
- Authored and maintained Terraform/Terragrunt modules for AKS, networking, storage, monitoring, and alerting resources, enabling consistent, repeatable infrastructure changes across environments.
- Migrated legacy VM-based services to AKS while preserving public IPs and DNS records, improving service availability and reducing operational overhead.
- Served as primary escalation owner for production incidents, coordinating cross-team response, restoring service quickly, and documenting post-incident improvements.
Cloud Engineer
StackIT Solutions
06.2017 - 11.2023
- Managed and maintained several highly available and fault-tolerant infrastructures across multiple availability zones and regions to ensure swift Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) on AWS using services including VPC, ECS, Lambda, EC2, IAM, Route53, S3, RDS, and DynamoDB.
- Established CI/CD pipelines for microservices using Jenkins and integrated Github, SonarQube, Docker, and Slack, reducing deployment times by 30% and improving developer feedback cycles.
- Automated infrastructure provisioning on AWS using Terraform and Ansible, significantly reducing manual configuration errors and accelerating deployment timelines.
Business Analyst
MKIT
08.2014 - 05.2017
- Spearheaded efforts to effectively and efficiently communicate and collaborate with clients to analyze their needs and create functional requirements for Business Process Re-engineering projects.
- Worked closely with software development and testing team members to design and develop robust solutions to meet client requirements for functionality, scalability, and performance.
Education
BBA - Marketing
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PASkills
- Proficient in Azure & AWS services
- Kubernetes administration
- Terraform / Terragrunt (Infrastructure as Code)
- Skilled in continuous delivery with ArgoCD
- CI/CD Pipelines
- Linux system management
- Docker & Containerization
- Prometheus and Grafana integration
- Bash / Shell Scripting
- Python
- Incident response
- Cloud security management
Timeline
Principal Cloud Operations Engineer
New Sun Road
11.2023 - Current
Cloud Engineer
StackIT Solutions
06.2017 - 11.2023
Business Analyst
MKIT
08.2014 - 05.2017
BBA - Marketing
University of Pittsburgh