KAI TANAKA
Senior Platform Engineer
I make infrastructure disappear. Kubernetes, GitOps, and the kind of
observability that pages you before customers notice.
kai@kaitanaka.dev · Portland, OR · kaitanaka.dev · GitHub: https://github.com/kaitanaka · LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/kaitanaka

ABOUT
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  • Nine years building and operating production Kubernetes clusters serving 50K+ rps across three cloud providers.
  • Built the platform that lets 200 engineers deploy to production 80 times per day with zero-downtime rollouts.
  • Maintain four CNCF-adjacent open-source tools with a combined 8K GitHub stars.
  • Deeply allergic to tickets that say "the deploy broke" — I build the systems that prevent them.

EXPERIENCE
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Senior Platform Engineer — Datadog  ·  Remote (Portland, OR)
2022 – Present
  Internal platform team building deployment, observability, and developer tools
  for 1,200 engineers.
  • Designed the multi-cluster GitOps deployment system handling 800+
  microservices across 4 regions; zero-downtime canary rollouts reduced incident
  rate by 62%.
  • Built the self-service namespace provisioning system that cut team
  onboarding from 3 weeks to 2 hours.
  • Led the migration from Helm to Kustomize + Argo CD across 120 services;
  reduced config drift incidents to near-zero.
  • On-call rotation lead; drove post-incident reviews that reduced MTTR from 45
  to 12 minutes over 18 months.
  Kubernetes · Argo CD · Terraform · Go · Prometheus

Infrastructure Engineer — Shopify  ·  Ottawa, ON (remote)
2019 – 2022
  Core infrastructure team supporting Shopify's multi-region Kubernetes
  platform.
  • Co-architected the Black Friday/Cyber Monday capacity planning system;
  handled 1.3M rps peak without manual intervention.
  • Built the cost attribution pipeline that tagged $42M/year in cloud spend to
  individual teams; drove a 28% reduction in waste.
  • Implemented pod security policies and network policies across 6,000
  namespaces; passed SOC 2 Type II audit with zero findings.
  • Mentored 5 junior engineers; 3 promoted to mid-level within 18 months.
  Kubernetes · GCP · Terraform · Ruby · Prometheus

Site Reliability Engineer — New Relic  ·  Portland, OR
2017 – 2019
  SRE for the core ingest pipeline processing 1 TB/hour of telemetry data.
  • Reduced the Kafka consumer lag from 45 minutes to under 30 seconds through
  partition rebalancing and consumer tuning.
  • Built the automated runbook system that resolved 40% of pages without human
  intervention.
  • Authored the incident response playbook adopted company-wide.
  Kafka · AWS · Ansible · Python · Grafana

CERTIFICATIONS
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Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) — CNCF / Linux Foundation  (2023)
Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS) — CNCF / Linux Foundation  (2024)
AWS Solutions Architect — Professional — Amazon Web Services  (2022)
HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate — HashiCorp  (2021)
Google Professional Cloud Architect — Google Cloud  (2020)

SKILLS
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Orchestration: Kubernetes, Argo CD, Flux, Helm, Kustomize, Istio
Infrastructure: Terraform, Pulumi, Crossplane, AWS, GCP, Azure
Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, Loki, Tempo
Languages: Go, Python, Rust, Bash, HCL, Rego
Data / Messaging: Kafka, NATS, Redis, Postgres, etcd
Practices: GitOps, SRE, Chaos engineering, Incident response, Capacity planning

OPEN SOURCE
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kube-janitor — Creator · Maintainer  (2021–)
  https://github.com/kaitanaka/kube-janitor
  A Kubernetes controller that automatically cleans up stale preview
  environments and expired resources based on TTL annotations. 3.2K stars.
  Tech: Go, Kubernetes, controller-runtime

tf-cost-guard — Creator  (2022)
  https://github.com/kaitanaka/tf-cost-guard
  A Terraform plan analyzer that estimates cost impact and blocks PRs exceeding
  budget thresholds. Integrates with GitHub Actions and GitLab CI.
  Tech: Go, Terraform, GitHub Actions

prom-aggregator — Creator  (2023)
  https://github.com/kaitanaka/prom-aggregator
  A Prometheus federation proxy that pre-aggregates high-cardinality metrics
  before they hit Thanos. Reduced Thanos query latency by 70% at Datadog.
  Tech: Rust, Prometheus

EDUCATION
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BSc, Computer Science — Oregon State University  (2017)
  Summa cum laude. Senior capstone: container orchestration for scientific
  computing.

LANGUAGES
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English — Native  ·  Japanese — Fluent