Kamal Hussain

I'm a freelance DevOps and cloud engineer based in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. I work with startups and scale-ups across the US, EU, and MENA on the infrastructure that lets them ship confidently — Kubernetes platforms, CI/CD pipelines, AWS infrastructure, and observability stacks.

My background is a bit of a journey. I started with Python and data science, curious about how data moves and gets transformed. That curiosity pulled me toward web development — building the systems that serve the data, not just analyze it. Then I discovered DevOps and found the work I actually wanted to do: the platform layer. The infrastructure that sits between code and users. The part that determines whether 2am is a boring night or a firefighting disaster.

Today I run the full range of DevOps and cloud work: building Kubernetes platforms on EKS from scratch, designing CI/CD pipelines that actually scale, writing Terraform that a team can maintain, wiring up observability so on-call rotations aren't a nightmare. I also do web development — Next.js, WordPress, custom themes, headless CMSs — mostly for clients who need both infrastructure and a site, and want one person who can do both well.

How I work

Async-first. I write things down. I document my decisions and the alternatives I rejected. I prefer a Notion doc or ADR over a Slack call. When I do get on a call, I prepare an agenda and take notes that get shared afterward.

GitOps by default — everything that matters lives in version control. Infrastructure state is not a mystery; it's a PR. Secrets management is not a spreadsheet; it's a vault. Every change is reviewed, every deployment is auditable.

I care about handover. When I leave a project, the team should be able to run the thing without me. That means runbooks, reasonable README files, and infrastructure that isn't held together by one person's tribal knowledge.

Currently

Open to new projects — Kubernetes platforms, CI/CD work, AWS infrastructure, and DevOps consulting. Typical engagement is 2–8 weeks for a focused build, or an ongoing retainer for platform engineering support. See what I'm working on now for more detail.