Dmitry Verkhoturov
Staff Site Reliability Engineer
About
I'm passionate about creating systems that run smoothly with minimal human intervention. My focus is on setting up effective automation and alerts so that when problems arise, the right people are notified and equipped with the necessary information and action plans.
I excel in high-ambiguity environments where I need to figure out the goals and pathways to achieve them. While I've worked extensively with major cloud providers like AWS and GCP, I prefer using their basic services to avoid vendor lock-in and unnecessary complexity.
Contributing to open-source projects is particularly rewarding for me. I enjoy solving real-world problems for people who might not have the technical skills to do so themselves. I'm constantly pushing myself to learn and improve - for instance, I went from having no experience with technical interviewing to becoming one of the most experienced interviewers in my area within a year.
I'm particularly drawn to challenging projects where I can make a significant impact. My aim is to build robust, efficient systems that support a healthy work-life balance, allowing for standard working hours while accommodating those who wish to dedicate more time to their work.
In essence, I strive to create reliable, low-maintenance systems that empower rather than hinder their users and maintainers.
Work Experience
Secret Startup
Dublin
July 2024 – Present
Site Reliability Engineer
Reliability of complex business-critical software systems managing hardware.
Senior Site Reliability Engineer, ABU Reliability
Booking.com is a leading internet travel company by market capitalization. I worked in the Accommodations BU, responsible for the company's core customer and partner-facing services.
Highlights
- Spearheaded reliability improvements across the company's largest revenue-generating department.
- Scaled a team from two to seven members, establishing robust processes.
- Conducted over 100 technical interviews in 2022, contributing to finding new colleagues and improving the process with feedback and question adjustments.
- Participated in critical on-call rotations at team, department, and company-wide levels.
- Contributed weekly tweaks to processes, code, and documentation within my reach across the company. Consistently ranked among top 5 Puppet code contributors company-wide.
- Drove improvements in Engineering promotions process alongside leadership, sharing knowledge about preparation for promotions with peers, and conducting peer case review groups with dozens of participants.
Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Private Cloud Adoption
Led the onboarding of major internal customer to the Private Cloud platform, adapting the foundation to customer requirements and integrating vendor products with internal systems, until dedicated EM and TPM took over most responsibilities, significantly reducing the scope of the role.
Highlights
- Acted as Technical Project Manager, leading negotiations and keeping the project on track.
- Authored and reviewed numerous Architecture Design Records, addressing complexity management challenges.
- Leveraged team's technical capabilities to focus on strategic direction and customer trust-building.
Site Reliability Engineer, Image Service and Email Infrastructure
For a year, responsible for image serving and transactional email delivery infrastructure.
Highlights
- Reduced maintenance and toil activities from 90% to 60% across three teams through automation.
- Drove migration from a pet to cattle approach to infrastructure for multiple teams and helped them decrease the noise-to-signal alerting ratio.
Site Reliability Engineer, Cloud Security
Provided security guardrails for cloud migration, balancing security needs with functionality for internal customers. My contributions included researching and implementing technical measures for SOx compliance and auditability, as well as keeping up with the work of hundreds of developers.
Monitoring Team Lead
Led a team ensuring 24/7/365 smooth operation of services for a 300+ employee adtech company with infrastructure in AWS and GCP processing millions of transactions per minute.
Highlights
- Slashed daily company-wide incident alerts from 200 to 5-10.
- Developed applications in Python, Puppet (Ruby), and SQL.
- Implemented ITIL-based incident management procedures, still in use years later.
- Established and led a new eight-person team across three cities.
- Produced extensive documentation and recorded videos for internal education.
- Developed incident management stats gathering and visualization systems.
- Introduced key SRE concepts to the company.
- In the last 6 months, switched to the devops team to tackle new challenges and expand expertise in technologies like Jenkins, GitLab and Kubernetes. I've implemented Prometheus monitoring for team infrastructure, and developed Groovy code and tests, creating numerous internal and open-source Helm charts.
Senior System Engineer
Responsible for client integration and support for a telecom content provider. Focused on monitoring, troubleshooting applications, and network investigations. Automated routine tasks using Bash, Perl, and Python.
Compulsory military service
Completed one year of compulsory military service, which turned out to be a crash course in resilience and people skills. Stuck with the same hundred people 24/7, I had to learn how to navigate complex social situations and negotiate effectively - there was simply no other option. This experience opened my eyes to how people can affect each other, for better or worse, and taught me the art of finding compromises in tough spots. It wasn't always pretty, but it definitely made me more empathetic and adaptable, skills that have proven surprisingly useful in the tech world.
BioChemMack (medical equipment dealer)
Moscow
October 2010 – December 2012
System Engineer
Created and populated an internal infrastructure wiki, migrated the primary server from CentOS to Ubuntu, and improved network architecture. Provided technical support for medical equipment users in a 70-employee company.
System Engineer
As the sole IT professional, established network setups, created infrastructure documentation, and contributed to website development and SEO. Later transitioned to assisting with IT contractor management and goal-setting.
Contact
Dublin IE
+31645790406
Education
-
2006 2012
Synergy University
Master's degree
Information Security
Courses- Information security and information protection
- Computer networks
- Database administration
- Operating systems and environments
- Programming theory
- C++ programming basics
- Information security engineering
- Security of operating system of clients
- Server operating system security
- Database security
- Security of data transmission networks and channels
- Security of internet resources
Skills
Programming
Go
Python
TypeScript
Microservices
Algorithms and Data Structures
High Load
Site Reliability Engineering
Incident Management
Load Balancing
Scalable and Reliable Systems
Cost-effective Redundancy
Automated Provisioning
Monitoring
SRE Principles
Analysis and Troubleshooting
Establishing On-call Procedures
Zabbix
Bosun
Prometheus
Scalable System Administration
Cross-functional and Cross-team Collaboration
Technical Project Management
Linux Core Utils
Infrastructure as Code
Configuration Management
Bash
Ruby
Puppet
Terraform
Docker
Kubernetes
Helm
Cloud Providers
Amazon Web Services
Google Cloud Platform
Alibaba Cloud
Databases
SQL
MongoDB
Local App Storage Engines (bbolt)
Interests
Skydiving
Fiction books, English and Russian classics and sci-fi