Santiago Velázquez
Platform DevOps Engineer – IDF Matzov Graduate | GitLab | OpenShift | CI/CD | Infra Automation
Profile
Platform DevOps Engineer with hands-on experience building and maintaining high-availability infrastructure, clustered environments, and Al-poweredinternal tooling at scale. Skilled in automation, container orchestration, and load balancing to drive performance and reliability. Strong background in observability, CI/CD, and production-grade MLOps workflows — including vector databases, model inference APIs, and real-time semantic search systems. Contributed to a platform team serving 2,000+ users by modernizing legacy infrastructure and deploying scalable, maintainable solutions.
Work Experience
DevOps Engineer – Matzov (Israel Defense Forces)
- Deployed and maintained a bare-metal OpenShift cluster supporting containerized production workloads.
- Led transition from standalone Docker-based setups of GitLab, Jira, and Confluence to enterprise-grade deployments.
- Administered Jira and Confluence, improving performance and uptime via advanced config and monitoring.
- Implemented PostgreSQL optimizations and performed complex, high-load data migrations.
- Developed Python and JavaScript automation tools for provisioning, deployment, and maintenance tasks.
- Designed HAProxy-based load balancing strategies to improve system availability and response time.
- Built a full-stack Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system integrating GitLab, Qdrant, and VSCode:
- Automated embedding of GitLab repos into vector DBs via Python and Qwen3; enabled semantic code search in VSCode.
- Used UUIDv5 and chunk diffing to avoid redundant uploads; orchestrated CI with n8n and served results through FastAPI.
- Delivered real-time, context-aware completions to devs via the Continue plugin, supporting scalable, multi-project use.
Assistant Teacher – Alonei Yitzhak Youth Village
- Taught Mathematics, English, and Physics to high school students.
- Created tailored learning materials and provided one-on-one academic support.
Education
- DevOps Engineer – Matzov School (Israel Defense Forces)
Selected through a competitive admission process. Completed 3.5 months of intensive, full-time DevOps training (8 AM–11 PM daily) prior to assignment in Matzov Unit. - Mechinat Melach Haaretz
Focused on youth leadership, social responsibility, and teamwork through volunteer and community-based projects. - High School – Alonei Yitzhak School
Specializations: 5-unit Mathematics, 5-unit Computer Science, 5-unit Physics.
Skills
Tech: Linux, Ansible, Docker, Kubernetes, HAProxy, GitLab CI/CD, PostgreSQL, Redis, Jira, Confluence
Languages: Hebrew, Italian, English
Other: Automation scripting (Python, JavaScript), Observability & Monitoring, Infrastructure at Scale
Contact
- Email: santivelazqueziusim@gmail.com
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/santiago-velazquez-iusim
- Medium: medium.com/@santivelazquez