Senior Platform Engineer, SmartNews | Tokyo, Japan
Email: nakamume@gmail.com | LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/nakamume | Website: www.nakam.org
PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY
Senior Platform Engineer with 8+ years of experience driving large-scale cloud-infrastructure modernization and scaling in production environments (30+ Kubernetes clusters, 3K+ nodes). Specializes in building internal platforms, declarative provisioning systems, and secure cloud-native infrastructure. Proven record of reducing infrastructure costs by six figures, increasing system reliability, and accelerating developer workflows through automation and enablement.
TECHNICAL SKILLS
| Category | Technologies |
|---|---|
| Infrastructure & Cloud | AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, Crossplane, CircleCI, ArgoCD, Packer, Helm |
| Observability | OpenTelemetry, Honeycomb, Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana |
| Languages | Go, Python, Bash, Java, Jsonnet |
| Data & Messaging | PostgreSQL, Redis, DynamoDB, Kafka |
EXPERIENCE
Senior Software Engineer - Platform | SmartNews Tokyo (July 2022 - Present)
- Led the upgrade of 30+ EKS clusters (3K+ nodes) across three Kubernetes versions by implementing an automated EC2 AMI pipeline with Packer and CircleCI, coordinated API-deprecation migrations with teams, created rollback strategies; resulted in reduced upgrade time by 60%.
- Scaled the observability platform to handle 40B+ daily events by designing a Kafka-based buffering system with OpenTelemetry Collector and Refinery; implemented adaptive autoscaling using historical load patterns and queue metrics, cutting compute costs by 50% and eliminating processing failures during peak load.
- Drove cross-team initiatives that trimmed cloud-infrastructure spend by $1M/year through systematic identification and cleanup of unused resources and underutlized, improving Karpenter consolidation; developed automated policies for EBS snapshot lifecycles, load-balancer pruning, and container-image retention across 300+ projects.
- Strengthened compliance with ITGC/ISMS by enforcing strict production/non-production separation; migrated 300+ projects from static credentials to OIDC tokens in CircleCI, introduced IAM role boundaries, and leveraged VPC flow logs to detect cross-environment access.
- Modernized infrastructure management by introducing Crossplane-based provisioning for 100+ systems; improving developer experience by enabling self-service provisioning, RBAC-aware access, and continuous reconciliation.
- Designed and led a dual-stack networking migration, adding IPv6 support across VPCs with zero downtime; updated AWS load-balancer and DNS controllers for IPv6/AAAA records, created migration playbooks, and delegated tasks—lowering IPv4 costs and mitigating address exhaustion.
- Improved incident response by establishing structured protocols for critical production issues; resolved IPv6 routing failures in Ads systems, CI/CD pipeline outages, cross-cluster DNS conflicts, and container registry throttling, provided runbooks, and implemented SLO-based alerting.
Software Engineer - Platform | SmartNews Tokyo (Dec 2021 - June 2022)
- Enhanced infrastructure security by replacing a legacy bastion host that used shared SSH keys with a pool of ephemeral tunnel instances; built a CLI tool that leverages AWS EC2 Connect, IAM-based authentication, and SSH ProxyCommand, reducing security risks and seamlessly integrating with existing SSH workflows for 200+ developers.
- Developed a standardized E2E testing framework for Kubernetes controllers; created reusable components for infrastructure tests (pod creation, DNS resolution, load-balancer provisioning) and integrated automated metrics collection and alerting, reducing MTTD and MTTR through SLO-based error detection.
Software Engineer - DevOps Lead | Telus International (Nov 2019 - Nov 2021)
- Led a 17-person distributed team through the separation of shared infrastructure; designed and executed a zero-downtime migration strategy for 10+ services, maintaining 99.9% availability and continuous developer workflows.
- Improved CI/CD reliability by implementing Jenkins pipelines-as-code using the Jenkins DSL plugin, replacing manual pipeline management in the Jenkins UI; migrated 50+ pipelines, added Git-based version control with PR reviews, and enabled automated rollbacks.
Software Engineer - SRE | Works Applications Tokyo (Oct 2017 - Oct 2019)
- Designed and built an environment-scheduler system that used usage analytics and custom policies to shut down idle staging and development environments; adopted across 10+ environments and saved $36K/year in compute costs.
- Developed a ChatOps automation platform for 100+ internal users, integrating with ticketing and HR tools to streamline operations workflows and reduce manual toil.
EDUCATION
B.Tech in Computer Science (2013–2017) | Indian Institute of Technology, Bhubaneswar | GPA: 8.6/10 | Top 10%
CERTIFICATES
- Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) (June 2020 - June 2023)
- AWS Solutions Architect – Professional (Mar 2022 – 2025)
- Microsoft Azure Administrator – Associate (Feb 2021 - Feb 2023)