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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 PostgreSQL eBPF Rust Go Python

Work

WSO2

Associate Technical Lead

Full-time

Feb 2026 — now
  • Led Skills and MCP integration for OpenChoreo, shipping patterns for writing Skills that survive real agent loops without drowning context, enforced through CI so quality doesn't quietly regress
  • Reduced OpenChoreo onboarding time to under 15 minutes by designing a single-command Docker-based quick start with all dependencies pre-configured
  • Took initiative to refactor Helm chart distribution into production-first defaults, moving dev conveniences to an explicit opt-in quick-start path
  • Increased new user comprehension of OpenChoreo by rewriting the installation guide as a dual-purpose walkthrough that teaches platform concepts during setup
Kubernetes Helm Go Platform Engineering CNCF MCP AI Agents

Full-time

Feb 2024 — Feb 2026
  • 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
  • Found 80 security issues in Pixie on my own initiative, fixed over-provisioned RBAC permissions and contributed 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
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  • · 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.