Leke Ariyo
Since my first lines of code in C 13+ years ago, I’ve been driven to solve problems with software. Today, I design cloud platforms, data strategies, and AI products that deliver measurable outcomes—and I share that journey by mentoring engineers and growing communities
Entrepreneurship
Exploring business products and developer-experience tools. I like turning pain points into simple, scalable services.
Mentorship
I’ve mentored 2000+ engineers via Utiva/Codementor and community sessions - focusing on practical DevOps skills and career growth.
Startups
A few products I’ve incubated, each with clear phases
QuickPickup
On-demand pickup & delivery aggregator for local merchants; smart batching, live tracking, and courier marketplace.
Escroo
Escrow rails for peer-to-peer marketplaces and high-value transactions - milestone releases, dispute workflows, and KYC.
HomeForYou
AI-assisted property recommendations: describe your ideal home; the engine ranks cross-market listings by fit.
Experience
Senior Cloud Engineer - Lloyds Banking Group, Edinburgh
- Automated Terraform modules and GitHub Actions pipelines for 200+ microservices across AWS & GCP, cutting infra build time 70%.
- Deployed EKS and GKE clusters in 3 regions with Istio ingress/egress - achieved 99.99% uptime for payments APIs.
- Implemented AWS WAF and Istio AuthorizationPolicies, blocking 97% of malicious traffic with zero false positives.
- Built a Golang operator (kopf) to auto-rotate DB credentials via Vault, adopted by 5 teams; eliminated 100+ tickets/month.
- Optimised VPC peering & TGW routing, reducing cross-region latency 25%.
Lead SRE/DevOps - Anima App (YC18), Remote
- Built GKE + Istio platform from scratch; scaled to 1M+ MAU and #1 Figma dev plugin.
- Authored Helmfile + FluxCD GitOps - deploy time 30 min → 5 min.
- Integrated Prometheus, Thanos, Loki; SLO-based alerting cut MTTR 50%.
- Drove cloud cost review saving 32% annually via rightsizing and spot adoption.
Site Reliability Engineer - Pocket Network Inc, Florida
- Operated 50+ blockchain validator clusters on AWS & Azure handling $1.5B/day traffic with zero slashing.
- Developed Bash/Terraform automation for multi-region bootstrap; rollout 3h → 20m.
- Configured Istio mTLS and network policies securing inter-node RPC traffic.
DevOps Engineer - FoodCourt (YC S22)
- Provisioned PCI-DSS compliant AWS infra with Terragrunt; enforced WAF ACLs and Security Hub benchmarks.
- Deployed containerised Go services to ECS with ALB + WAF, reducing attack surface 40%.
Education
- MSc, Machine Learning & Deep Learning - University of Strathclyde (2022–2023)
- BEng, Electrical & Electronics Engineering - University of Ilorin (2014–2019)
Certifications
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional
- AWS Certified Developer - Associate
- Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
- Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS)
- HashiCorp Terraform Associate
- Google Cloud - Associate Cloud Engineer (ACE)
- Google Cloud - Professional Data Engineer
- Microsoft - Azure Administrator (AZ-104)
Music
Blog
- How I design for failure first
- GitOps that actually speeds you up
- Observability as a product
More
Outcomes I’m known for
- 99.995% uptime - multi-zone design, SLOs, rapid rollback, error budgets.
- ↓80% MTTD - golden-signal alerts + actionable dashboards (<3m).
- ↓30% deploy time - standardized pipelines + GitOps (Argo CD).
Open Source
Recent contributions and projects.
Media
Speaking & Judging
Main-stage session on SRE: canaries, SLOs, and failure design.
Publications
- AI for Sustainable Development and Climate Actionn — JOSTE, Vol. 3 (3) Read Article ↗
- Design and Construction of a Solar-powered Automatic Irrigation System with IOT support — IJCAT, Vol. 14 (6) Read Article ↗
Newsletter
Get occasional notes on DevOps, reliability, and career growth.