$ whoami → Lead DevOps & Cloud Infrastructure Engineer (level 4 of 5) · Budapest · 13+ years

I build Cloud Infrastructure that stays boring, and I automate everything that doesn't.

13+ years in software and infrastructure engineering since October 2013, including 10+ years in DevOps and Cloud Infrastructure since March 2016.

• I lead Cloud Infrastructure at Protex AI. I set technical direction, review important pull requests, and write infrastructure code every week
• I sit at level 4 of 5 there, the Staff-equivalent band. Protex has no Staff or Principal title, so this is the scope other companies file under Staff
• Building and operating planet-express, a production-grade Talos Kubernetes homelab with 100% IaC and an ADR for every non-obvious choice
• Contributing documentation and Hungarian translations to Home Assistant
• Mentoring engineers and giving guest lectures when asked
• Recognition: Star Employee Award, Protex AI Outstanding Contributor Awards, September 2026
• 70+ technical and hiring manager interviews conducted

I work best in a player-coach role. I set technical direction, review technical decisions, unblock engineers, and mentor people while staying close to the systems.

• I lead infrastructure incident response and post-mortems, and I am the go-to person for infrastructure issues
• I built a cross-country engineering team from zero, including 1:1s, status cadences, coaching, and team operations
• I migrated legacy Terraform to a stack-based IaC pattern with secrets management, Terraform tests, and an ADR program
• I lead AWS cost optimization, rightsizing, and reserved-savings analysis
• I am a key contact for a handful of vendors, handling license, extension, and renewal agreements

From October 2013 to July 2025, I worked at Sonrisa, where I progressed from Software Engineer to DevOps Engineer to Senior DevOps Engineer and Technical Lead. I left on Senior II, level 8 on a 9-level ladder where 1 is entry level, 7 is Senior, and 9 is reserved as an honor. I mentored multiple engineers at Sonrisa. One of them progressed from entry-level Junior Engineer to Senior Engineer and then to Tech Lead under my mentorship before I left in July 2025.

At Protex AI, I served as Lead DevOps Engineer on the Platform Team from July to August 2025. I then served as Engineering Manager and Lead DevOps Engineer for the Cloud Infrastructure Team from September 2025 to May 2026. When the Infrastructure Team was formed in May 2026, I decided to step back from people management and returned to a hands-on Lead DevOps Engineer role.

AWS (ECS, VPC, IAM, RDS) · OpenTofu + Terragrunt · Ansible · Jenkins -> GitHub Actions -> GitLab CI · Datadog · Snyk / Aikido · Python / Bash · Linux

Kubernetes and its observability stack, properly, bottom-up: planet-express runs Talos, ArgoCD, Cilium, Kyverno, and kube-prometheus-stack, operated like production and documented with an ADR for every non-obvious choice. Not my day-job platform yet; that's exactly what the lab is for.

Bouldering · DIY electronics and an ESPHome fleet · mechanical keyboards (QMK) · convincing people that Terragrunt was the right call

• Web: peidl.net, hand-built, no trackers (psst: try typing :h there)
• Email: contact@peidl.net
• LinkedIn: in/gergely-peidl