About

I’m Santiago Velázquez, a pragmatic, self-driven DevOps and Platform Engineer who believes in understanding systems from the ground up and delivering with clarity and intent.

I served in the IDF’s Matzov unit, a highly selective cyber and engineering division. Everything I worked on involved real infrastructure at scale, with zero margin for error. I had to own systems end to end, learn fast, and deliver under pressure, and that’s exactly what I did.

I’ve managed high-availability environments using Kubernetes, OpenShift, GitLab CI/CD, and HAProxy. I’ve deployed and administered internal platforms like GitLab (Omnibus), Jira, and Confluence, supporting a user base of over 2,000 people. I’ve written automation in Python and Bash, handled observability setups, and worked across systems involving reverse proxies, TLS, PostgreSQL, firewalls, and network routing.

One of my core projects involved building a full-stack Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system that embedded GitLab repositories into a vector database using Qwen3 and Qdrant, making code semantically searchable from inside VS Code. I orchestrated the full pipeline including deduplication, embedding, chunking, and query serving via FastAPI, all wired together with event-driven CI flows in n8n. This gave me hands-on experience working with language models, embeddings, vector databases, and real-world MLOps practices such as deployment, monitoring, and inference API management.

Most of what I know, from mathematics to infrastructure, I taught myself. I’ve deployed and operated systems in AWS, designed cloud architectures, and worked extensively with on-prem infrastructure, and I understand the architectural decisions that make systems reliable and maintainable in the real world.

My approach is simple. No buzzwords, no shortcuts, just structured thinking, clear communication, and tools that hold up under real use. I care about clean automation, robust documentation, and solving the problem that actually matters.

I speak English, Spanish, and Hebrew fluently. Outside of work, I keep a disciplined focus on training, health, and continuous learning, because good engineering starts with sharp habits.

If you’re looking for someone who figures things out, doesn’t need hand-holding, and builds clean systems under pressure, we’ll probably work well together.