Sophia Garbenis
Senior Platform Engineer
South Elgin,IL
Summary
Performance-driven Senior Platform / DevOps Engineer specializing in Kubernetes, AWS, and cloud infrastructure automation. Experienced in leading large-scale platform modernization initiatives including Karpenter, GitOps, Istio service mesh, observability, and chaos engineering, with a strong focus on reliability, scalability, operational efficiency, and security.
Overview
9
9
years of professional experience
4
4
Certification
Work History
Senior Platform Engineer
Lululemon Athletica
10.2021 - Current
- Supported enterprise AWS EKS infrastructure across 19+ Kubernetes clusters, supporting 500+ microservices, 3,500+ namespaces, and large-scale production workloads.
- Led migration from Cluster Autoscaler to Karpenter, improving provisioning speed by an estimated 40–60% and contributing to approximately 25–35% infrastructure cost reduction through optimized node scaling and consolidation.
- Contributed to GitOps modernization by migrating 75+ platform services and applications from FluxCD to ArgoCD, improving deployment consistency and operational visibility.
- Led implementation and production rollout of Istio Service Mesh across multi-environment Kubernetes infrastructure, improving resiliency, observability, traffic management, and secure service-to-service communication.
- Built infrastructure automation and CI/CD workflows using Terraform, Helm, GitLab CI/CD, GitHub Actions, and Kubernetes-native tooling, reducing manual deployment effort by approximately 45%.
- Developed chaos engineering and observability initiatives using AWS FIS, Datadog, CloudWatch, Splunk, and Terraform, improving resiliency testing and reducing incident investigation time by an estimated 30–40%.
DevOps Engineer
IBM
01.2020 - 10.2021
- Built and supported Kubernetes-based deployment workflows using Docker, Helm, Jenkins, and CI/CD automation across development and production environments supporting dozens of containerized applications.
- Automated infrastructure provisioning and cloud resource management using Terraform, Ansible, and AWS services, reducing manual deployment effort by an estimated 40–50% and improving deployment consistency.
- Supported Kubernetes environments across development and production, contributing to platform scalability, deployment reliability, and operational stability for engineering teams.
- Collaborated on cloud modernization and microservices initiatives within AWS environments, helping improve deployment speed and operational efficiency across distributed systems.
Cloud Engineer
ICE
12.2017 - 01.2020
- Supported AWS cloud infrastructure environments including EC2, VPC, Route53, Auto Scaling Groups, and security configurations across production systems.
- Automated infrastructure provisioning and deployment workflows using Terraform, Ansible, and Jenkins, improving operational efficiency and reducing repetitive manual tasks by approximately 30–40%.
- Built and maintained Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solutions to standardize cloud deployments and improve infrastructure scalability across AWS environments.
- Participated in cloud modernization, automation, and operational support initiatives supporting highly available AWS infrastructure and production workloads.
Education
Associate of Science - Information Technology
William Rainey Harper College
Palatine, IL05-2018
Skills
* Kubernetes Platform Engineering
* AWS Cloud Infrastructure
* Platform Reliability & Observability
* GitOps & Infrastructure Automation
* Infrastructure as Code (Terraform / CloudFormation)
* Service Mesh & Microservices Architecture
* Chaos Engineering & Resilience Testing
* CI/CD & Deployment Automation
Certification
* Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
* Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD)
* AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
* AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
* Terraform Associate
Timeline
Senior Platform Engineer
Lululemon Athletica
10.2021 - Current
DevOps Engineer
IBM
01.2020 - 10.2021
Cloud Engineer
ICE
12.2017 - 01.2020
Associate of Science - Information Technology
William Rainey Harper College