Talha Imtiaz

Based in Lahore · Open to Working Remote · US/EU hours

Engineering systems that hold.

Talha Imtiaz
  • Scaled GKE multiplayer backends from 80 to 400+ concurrent players without crashing.
  • Secured regulated US fintech APIs and databases entirely off the public internet.
  • Hardened healthcare AWS estates to meet strict SOC 2 Type 1 and HIPAA obligations.
View Production WorkRésumé

I read the codebase, not just the infra

I’m Talha — a DevOps engineer who came up as a software engineer first. I work across Kubernetes, GKE, KEDA autoscaling, Dockerized services, GitLab and GitHub CI/CD, observability, incident response, and hardened Linux deployments.

Based in Lahore, Pakistan · working US/EU hours. Open to the right fully remote DevOps role.

A one-minute hello · captioned
LinkedInGitHub

Production infrastructure I built, and why

When More Pods Meant Fewer Players: Scaling a Live Multiplayer Game on GKE

A live, host-led game crashed once a room passed 70–80 players, and the standard fix, adding collaboration-server pods, made it worse. Why that happened, and what I did instead.

Read the engineering story

Client details stay private. I can share the architecture, the constraints, and the reasoning.

Hand-drawn diagram of a multiplayer game on GKE: players join the lobby by QR code, a player-count metric API reads the lobby and KEDA scales the Next.js pods before the game starts, and the API pod is split from the Hocuspocus pods, which run as two large pods of 100–150 players each.

The teams and systems behind these numbers

  • ↳Rebuilt platform access on GKE as a zero-trust WireGuard overlay: took every database off public IPs — three were exposed, the estate is four now, none reachable from outside — with per-environment CI identities and two human access tiers.
  • ↳Closed all four public administrative paths on a healthcare AWS estate carrying SOC 2 Type 1 and HIPAA obligations: EKS API and nodes made private, both bastions' ingress emptied, verified by connection timeout rather than policy review.
  • ↳Replaced two static IAM keys, one of them cluster-admin, with GitHub OIDC per-run identity and namespaced EKS access entries across seven repositories.
  • ↳Built cross-region backup for the same estate and published the measured 40–50 minute copy lag as the recovery point, rather than the hourly target the design was scoped against.

Employment references

“I'd confidently recommend Talha to any team looking for a reliable, autonomous DevOps or Platform Engineer.”

Saad Abdullah

Saad Abdullah

Cloud, DevOps, & Solutions Architecture · Toptal

Direct Manager

“I would trust Talha with an ambiguous production issue and expect him to return not just with a fix, but with a clear understanding of the root cause.”

Abdullah Tarar

Abdullah Tarar

Cloud Infrastructure & DevOps Engineer

Senior Teammate

Stack

  • Kubernetes
  • GKE
  • Docker
  • Terraform
  • Pulumi
  • GitHub Actions
  • GitLab CI
  • AWS
  • Cloudflare
  • Datadog
  • Prometheus
  • Linux
  • Next.js
  • TypeScript
Reference architecture · source public

Built in public, so you can read every line.

Platform Engineering

The Secret That Guards the Secrets: A Reference EKS Platform on AWS

A reference EKS platform I built in public. Its workloads need secrets from AWS, and the usual way to fetch them is a static key, which is just one more secret to store, rotate and leak. What I used instead of a key, and how I tested it.

No users, no traffic — built to demonstrate the architecture.

AWS EKSTerraformArgoCDExternal Secrets OperatorAWS Secrets Manager
SourceView Case Study

Software work that taught me what breaks

Architecture diagram of a lab analysis platform: microscope hardware driven through the Toupcam SDK streams live video into a Flask and Flask-SocketIO server behind Nginx on DigitalOcean; motility analysis runs on CUDA GPU workers using frame skipping and multithreaded chunk processing, with results pushed back to browser clients across three laboratory sites over websockets.
GPU / Real-Time Systems🇮🇳
01Software Engineer / Deployment Engineer

The Lag Wasn't the Network: Putting Three Labs' Microscopes in the Browser

Three labs wanted to drive their microscopes from a browser in real time, but every control change lagged. The obvious suspect was the network. It wasn't. Where the lag really lived, and the second bottleneck behind it.

  • Flask
  • Flask-SocketIO
  • CUDA
  • Docker
  • +4
Read case study
Screens from a therapy platform built with Expo and React Native: Agora carries real-time video between therapist and patient while a transcription agent joins the call, streams multilingual speech-to-text to the dashboard, and stores transcripts in AWS S3; a Socket.IO channel synchronises EMDR session state — direction, speed, color, audio — between the therapist dashboard and the patient app.
Mobile Product Delivery🇪🇺
02Full-Stack / Release Engineer

The Fix Expo Kept Throwing Away: Shipping a Real-Time Therapy App to Both Stores

A therapy app needed live video, transcription and therapist-steered EMDR in one session, on medical data. Then the iOS build broke on a bitcode error, and the standard fix kept silently vanishing. Where it went, and how I made it stick.

  • Expo
  • React Native
  • Agora
  • Socket.IO
  • +3
Read case study

Working through these problems in public

Latest writing on DevOps, CI/CD, containers, and platform engineering across Medium and Carbonteq.

Recent Writing

03 / 05 Articles

Building an Appium E2E QA Pipeline with BrowserStack and GitLab CI
Medium

Building an Appium E2E QA Pipeline with BrowserStack and GitLab CI

How I automated mobile QA by running Appium tests on BrowserStack, generating reports, emailing results, and uploading artifacts back to GitLab.

Building a Smart GitLab CI/CD Pipeline for React Native: Native Builds, OTA Updates, and Release Control
Medium

Building a Smart GitLab CI/CD Pipeline for React Native: Native Builds, OTA Updates, and Release Control

How I built a GitLab pipeline that decides whether a React Native change needs a full Expo native build or can safely ship as an OTA update.

From Docker to Podman: Understanding Rootless, Daemonless Containers
Medium

From Docker to Podman: Understanding Rootless, Daemonless Containers

A practical explanation of how Podman differs from Docker, why rootless containers matter, and how to run a simple app with Podman.

View archive on Medium

Consulting

I also take a small number of fixed-scope reviews for early-stage teams — a written read on what breaks first under load, ranked by blast radius. The sample report is public and ungated.

Infrastructure teardown →Launch review →

Academics & Research

Formal education and published undergraduate research.

2020 – 2024
Dean's Honor List

GIKI

Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology

Degree Earned

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science

FYP Expo @ GIKI

3rd Position Overall

Awarded for top-tier undergraduate research execution and demonstration.

PublishedIEEE Xplore (2024)

A Novel Genetic Algorithm Timetable Generator

Peer-reviewed research paper detailing optimization strategies for complex academic scheduling constraints using evolutionary algorithms.

Optimization & Evolutionary Computing
Industry Exposure

CareCloud Tour

Selected for a fully-sponsored industry tour showcasing modern healthcare cloud infrastructure.

Hiring, or need a read on your infrastructure?

If you are hiring for production infrastructure, send the role — email is fastest, and the résumé is one click. If you are not hiring but your deploy path, CI/CD, or AI-built app needs a serious review, the consulting pages have the scope and the pricing.

Email Me

hello@talhaimtiaz.me

Résumé

Download the PDF

LinkedIn

Connect Professionally

Remote setup: EOR or B2B contractor — both are straightforward from Pakistan, and I can be onboarded either way. (Direct local employment is the one route that doesn't work from here.)

Or book a 30-minute call →

© 2026 TALHA IMTIAZ

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