KH.
CI/CD Pipeline Engineering

Service

CI/CD Pipeline Engineering

Pipelines that deploy in minutes, not hours — and stay green.

Slow CI is a morale tax. A pipeline that takes 45 minutes per run, fails intermittently, or requires manual steps before production is a pipeline that engineers work around — not with. I design and build CI/CD pipelines that are fast, reliable, and opinionated about keeping main deployable. That means parallelised test suites, multi-environment promotion gates, secret injection that doesn't involve spreadsheets, and deployment strategies that make rollbacks boring. The goal is a pipeline your team trusts enough to actually use on every commit.

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Who this is for

  • Teams with a Jenkins setup that "works" but nobody wants to touch
  • Startups still doing manual deployments or running ad-hoc deploy scripts
  • Engineering teams where CI flakiness has become a running joke
  • Companies where production deploys require a senior engineer to babysit
  • Teams that want GitHub Actions but aren't sure how to structure it well

What you get

Pipeline architecture design

Documented strategy covering trigger model, environment promotion flow (dev → staging → production), rollback approach, and secrets management.

CI workflow implementation

Build, lint, test, security scan — all parallelised where possible. Caching configured for dependencies and Docker layers to minimise build times.

CD deployment strategy

ArgoCD GitOps or direct deployment pipelines with blue/green or canary rollout, automated smoke tests, and automatic rollback on failure metrics.

Secrets management integration

OIDC-based cloud authentication (no long-lived credentials in CI). Secrets pulled from Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, or GitHub Secrets — scoped to the minimum necessary.

Multi-environment configuration

Environment-specific configuration via Helm values, Kustomize overlays, or environment files — with clear promotion gates between environments.

Notifications and observability

Slack/PagerDuty alerts on deploy failures, duration regressions, and security scan findings. Deploy frequency and lead time tracked from day one.

How it works

01

Pipeline audit

1–2 days

I map your current deployment process — what's automated, what's manual, where failures happen, and where engineers lose time. I measure current deploy frequency, lead time, and MTTR.

02

Architecture design

2–3 days

I produce a pipeline design covering tooling choice, trigger model, environment strategy, secrets approach, and rollback mechanism. We align on this before writing code.

03

CI implementation

1–2 weeks

Build, test, lint, and security scan jobs built and optimised. Caching layers configured. Flaky tests identified and quarantined or fixed.

04

CD implementation

1–2 weeks

Deployment workflows built for each environment. Promotion gates configured. Smoke tests and automatic rollback conditions defined.

05

Dry-run and validation

2–3 days

Full pipeline run with a real deployment to staging and production. Rollback tested. Deploy times measured against targets.

06

Handover

1–2 days

Team walkthrough of the pipeline logic, troubleshooting guide for common failures, and documentation of the secrets model and promotion flow.

Pricing

Most pipeline builds are scoped as fixed-price projects: £2,500–£7,000 depending on the number of services, environments, and whether legacy CI needs to be replaced or rebuilt. Ongoing retainers available for teams that want a dedicated DevOps engineer without the headcount cost.

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Frequently asked questions

GitHub Actions or Jenkins — which should I use?+
GitHub Actions for almost everything new. It's cheaper to run, easier to maintain, has a large ecosystem of actions, and integrates natively with your repository. Jenkins makes sense if you have significant existing pipeline investment, need to run on-premise, or have very complex build graphs that benefit from the plugin ecosystem. I'll recommend based on your situation.
Our CI takes 40 minutes. How fast can you make it?+
Depends on what's slow. Common wins: parallelising test suites (often 60–70% reduction), fixing Docker layer caching, removing redundant steps, and splitting slow integration tests into a separate job that only runs on main. Sub-10-minute CI is achievable for most web/backend codebases without architectural changes.
We have flaky tests that cause CI failures. Is that a pipeline problem?+
Usually a test problem, but the pipeline can mask or expose it. I'll identify flaky tests during the audit, and depending on scope, either fix them, quarantine them, or give you a report of which tests need attention from your team.
How do you handle secrets in CI/CD?+
No long-lived credentials, ever. For AWS, I configure OIDC federation so GitHub Actions authenticates directly to AWS with a short-lived token tied to the specific repository and branch. For other secrets, I use Vault or the platform's native secrets management with the minimum required scope.
Do you support monorepos?+
Yes. Monorepo CI is mostly about affected-path detection — only building and testing what changed. I've implemented this with Nx, Turborepo, and custom path-filter logic in GitHub Actions and GitLab CI.