The Team

Built by engineers,
for engineers.

Orbital DevOps is a collective of senior infrastructure engineers who got tired of watching great teams struggle with problems we already knew how to solve.

Our Story

We started Orbital DevOps in 2018 after a combined 30+ years working inside some of the world's most demanding infrastructure environments — hyperscalers, fintech unicorns, and frontier AI labs.

The pattern we saw everywhere was the same: brilliant product engineers being held back by infrastructure that didn't scale, CI/CD pipelines that took 45 minutes, and Kubernetes clusters no one fully understood. Incidents were frequent, deployments were feared, and cloud bills were eye-watering.

We knew these problems were solvable. Not with magic — but with the right architecture, the right tooling, and engineers who had seen this before. That is what Orbital DevOps is: a small, highly specialized team that embeds with you and fixes things properly.

Core Competencies

What we are deeply good at

Built from a decade of production experience — not certifications on a slide deck.

Kubernetes & Platform Engineering

  • Kubernetes Multi-Cluster Architecture
  • Multi-Tenant Kubernetes Platforms
  • Internal Developer Platforms (IDP)
  • Self-Service Infrastructure & Golden Path Enablement
  • Private, Hybrid & Multi-Cloud Architecture

Automation & IaC

  • Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Helm, Ansible)
  • CI/CD & GitOps Workflows (ArgoCD, GitHub Actions)
  • High Availability & Disaster Recovery (HA/DR)
  • Capacity Planning & Performance Engineering

MLOps & AI Workloads

  • MLOps & AI Workload Orchestration
  • Model Deployment, Scaling & Monitoring
  • GPU Cluster Management
  • LLM Serving Infrastructure

Security & Compliance

  • DevSecOps Implementation & Security Audits
  • Zero-Trust Architecture & Container Security
  • IAM & SSO Architecture (Keycloak, OIDC, OAuth2)
  • Secrets Management & Dynamic Credential Provisioning (Vault)
  • Policy-as-Code (OPA / Kyverno)

Observability & SRE

  • Observability & Monitoring (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK)
  • Site Reliability Engineering (SLI/SLO/SLA Design)
  • Incident Response & Runbook Automation
  • OpenTelemetry & Distributed Tracing

Infrastructure & Networking

  • Linux Systems Architecture
  • Advanced Kubernetes Networking (Cilium, Istio)
  • Cost Optimization & FinOps Practices
  • Bare-Metal & Edge Deployments

Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)

CNCF-certified — every senior engineer on the team

Meet the team

Everyone you see here will actually work on your project.

AR

Alex Rivera

Founder & Principal Engineer

San Francisco, CA

13 years building distributed systems and Kubernetes platforms. Former Staff Engineer at a Fortune 100 cloud provider. Kubernetes upstream contributor (sig-autoscaling). Speaker at KubeCon NA 2022 & EU 2024.

Specialties

Platform EngineeringKubernetes InternalsFinOpsGo

Certifications

CKACKADCKSAWS Solutions Architect Pro
JK

Jordan Kim

Senior DevOps Architect

Austin, TX

11 years in DevOps and SRE. Specialized in CI/CD transformation and GitOps adoption. Led platform migrations at two unicorn startups. Maintainer of the Argo Project documentation.

Specialties

GitOpsArgoCDTektonObservability

Certifications

CKACKADTerraform AssociateGCP Professional DevOps
SO

Sam Osei

AI/ML Infrastructure Lead

New York, NY

10 years in ML systems engineering. Built GPU cluster infrastructure for large language model training at two frontier AI companies. Deep expertise in distributed training, model serving, and MLOps pipelines.

Specialties

GPU OrchestrationLLM ServingMLOpsPython/CUDA

Certifications

CKAAWS ML SpecialtyNVIDIA DLI Certified
DP

Dana Patel

Security & Compliance Engineer

London, UK

12 years in DevSecOps and cloud security. Former CISO advisory consultant. Led SOC2 Type II and HIPAA compliance programs for 20+ SaaS companies. CNCF Security Technical Advisory Group member.

Specialties

DevSecOpsPolicy-as-CodeSOC2/HIPAAVault

Certifications

CKSCISSPCNCF SecurityAWS Security Specialty

How we work

Our principles shape every engagement.

Senior-only engagements

Every engineer on your project has 10+ years in production environments. We don't use your engagement to train junior staff.

Opinionated but humble

We have strong opinions shaped by hard-won experience — but we listen first, understand your constraints, and adapt.

Open source citizenship

We give back to the ecosystem that built us. Contributors to Kubernetes, ArgoCD, Prometheus, and more.

Async-first, globally available

Engineers across US, UK, and AU time zones. We work in your tools: Slack, Linear, GitHub — not our own portal.

Track Record

Milestones

2014

Kubernetes 1.0 — we were there from the beginning

2016

First production K8s cluster at 1,000+ nodes

2018

Orbital DevOps founded

2020

First AI/ML GPU cluster deployment (128 A100s)

2022

KubeCon speaker, 200th cluster milestone

2024

LLM inference at 10,000+ tokens/sec in production

Want to work with us?

Tell us what you are building. We will respond within one business day with honest thoughts — even if we are not the right fit.

Get in Touch