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Experience

Building infrastructure and systems since 2014

Top Skills

Platform Engineering PyTorch ML Pipelines Vector Databases Kubernetes GPU Orchestration Service Mesh GitOps Observability eBPF Rust Go Python

Work

WSO2

Full-time

Feb 2024 — now
  • Architected eBPF-powered observability layer processing ~500GB/day telemetry with zero instrumentation overhead
  • Optimized Cilium network policies achieving 78% memory reduction and 90% startup delay decrease
  • Traced and fixed persistent Gateway 503s down to RST packet handling in Envoy/Cilium L7 proxy
  • Led all Cilium upgrades across production, managing major and minor versions with zero downtime
  • Consistently rated "Top 5%" in performance reviews
Kubernetes eBPF Cilium Prometheus Observability Go Platform Engineering

Full-time

Jun 2022 — Feb 2024
  • Led CNI migration from Azure to Cilium on 10,000+ pod cluster, designing rollback strategies and traffic validation to maintain 99.9% SLA
  • Built zero-instrumentation observability using eBPF and Pixie, enabling monitoring for any language without code changes
  • Resolved 80 security issues in Pixie including over-provisioned RBAC permissions, contributing fixes upstream
  • Delivered observability feature under tight deadline, coordinating with multiple teams to ship before KubeCon
  • Achieved "Top 5%" and "Top 20%" ratings with recognition for mastering eBPF and Kubernetes internals
DevOps eBPF Go Kubernetes Cilium Pixie OpenTelemetry

SUSE

Contract

Jun 2021 — Aug 2021
  • Built 'Logging Pipeline Plumber' Kubernetes operator for debugging Rancher/Banzai logging pipelines
  • Received praise from SUSE stating the project was "going to help SUSE Rancher immensely"
  • Learned how open source projects work from inside through mentorship from experienced SUSE engineer
view project
Go Kubernetes React Operators

ThinkSmart Solutions

Part-time

Jul 2021 — Jun 2022
  • Mentored development team on cloud-native practices and code quality
  • Provided guidance on architecture decisions enabling horizontal scaling
  • Transitioned to part-time to focus on final year while continuing to contribute
GitOps DevOps Kubernetes Mentorship

Full-time

Jul 2020 — Jun 2021
  • Introduced GitOps with FluxCD for declarative, auditable infrastructure deployments
  • Migrated legacy storage to GCP achieving 8x performance improvement
  • Led monolith to Go microservices decomposition improving scalability
  • Redesigned database schemas achieving 10-15x query performance gains
  • Engineered CI/CD pipeline accelerating production releases by 60%
Python GitOps Go GCP FluxCD ReactJS PostgreSQL

Part-time

Jul 2019 — Jun 2020
  • Achieved 50% reduction in cloud infrastructure costs through optimization
  • Maintained multi-cloud infrastructure across GCP, AWS, and DigitalOcean
  • Maintained MealFirst Operation Management Portal with ReactJS, Apollo, GraphQL
Python DevOps React Apollo GraphQL AWS GCP

Internship

Jan 2019 — Jun 2019
  • Established entire web infrastructure utilizing AWS and Google Cloud Platform
  • Devised CI/CD Pipeline with BitBucket Pipelines for rapid deployments
  • Demonstrated potential through hobby work leading to cloud infrastructure ownership
AWS GCP ReactJS Apollo GraphQL CI/CD

Black Assassins E-Sport

Side Project

Mar 2014 — Jun 2020
  • Started because local servers kept dying to DDoS attacks, figured I could do better with a $5/month DigitalOcean box
  • Grew into top 10 ranked server worldwide, 85,000+ players over 6 years
  • Built Django tool to auto-provision servers (was basically an RCE waiting to happen, but I didn't know better)
  • Found SQL injection in B3 server tool, got paid in Riot Points because I didn't have a bank account
view project
Linux Networking Server Administration Django DDoS Mitigation

Education

University of Westminster

Bachelor of Science (Hons), Computer Science

Sep 2018 — Jun 2022

First Class Honours (79.37%) · 4th in graduating class

  • · Thesis: Lazy-Koala - A Lightweight Framework for Root Cause Analysis in Distributed Systems
  • · Published research paper at IEEE ICCMC 2021
  • · Specialized in Cloud Computing and Machine Learning
  • · Participated in 13+ hackathons with top placements
  • · Led university engineering society initiatives
  • · Presented research on face recognition using deep learning

Richmond College

Physical Science

Feb 2005 — Aug 2018
  • · Held the position of President for the IT Society, spearheading the organization of an IT Day celebration that drew participants from over 30 schools across the country.
  • · Led the Robotics Society as President, participating in several island-wide competitions and driving the society's growth and success.
  • · Recognized as the most outstanding student in the senior IT section, showcasing exceptional talent and dedication to the field.

Certifications

Publications

About Isala Piyarisi

Builder and platform engineer with a track record of shipping products from scratch and seeing them through to scale. Works across the full stack from kernel to user interface.

AI & Machine Learning

Builds AI infrastructure and local-first AI systems. Experience with PyTorch, ML pipelines, RAG architectures, vector databases, and GPU orchestration. Created Tera, a local-first AI assistant built with Rust. Passionate about privacy-preserving AI that runs on-device.

Technical Range

Work spans: AI Infrastructure (local LLMs, ML pipelines, RAG, PyTorch), Platform Engineering (Kubernetes, observability, service mesh, GPU orchestration), and Systems (eBPF, Rust, Go, Linux internals).

Founder Mindset

Founded and ran a gaming community for 6 years, building infrastructure that served thousands of users. Built observability tools now used by developers daily. Approaches problems end-to-end, from design to production to on-call. Prefers building solutions over talking about them.

Current Work

Senior Software Engineer at WSO2, building Choreo developer platform. Architected eBPF-powered observability processing 500GB/day. Led Cilium CNI migration on 10,000+ pod cluster. Speaker at Conf42, KCD, and cloud-native events.