$ whoami

Gergely Peidl

Lead DevOps and Cloud Infrastructure Engineer@Protex AI. level 4 of 5, the Staff-equivalent band. 13+ years in software and infrastructure engineering since October 2013, including 10+ years in DevOps and Cloud Infrastructure since March 2016. I build Cloud Infrastructure that stays boring, and I automate everything that doesn't.

Budapest, HU · AWS · Kubernetes · Terraform · Home Assistant

see the homelab say hello

~/about.md

About

Lead DevOps and Cloud Infrastructure Engineer in Budapest.

I turn runbooks into pipelines, the short version of 13 years.

I'm a lead DevOps and cloud infrastructure engineer based in Budapest. I started as a software engineer with frontend and backend responsibilities before moving toward infrastructure. Somewhere along the way I found out that I enjoy making servers boring.

I work best in a player-coach role, combining technical direction, mentoring, and hands-on infrastructure engineering.

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.

These days I lead Cloud Infrastructure at Protex AI. I set technical direction, review important pull requests, and write infrastructure code every week. I care about infrastructure as code done properly, monitoring people actually look at, and automation as a default habit instead of an afterthought. My favorite tool of recent years is Terragrunt. It keeps large Terraform setups organized, and I will happily talk about it longer than you planned.

There is one rule behind all of it: if something breaks once, I make sure it never breaks that way again.

“Talk is cheap. Show me the code.”

Linus Torvalds
role
Lead DevOps and Cloud Infrastructure Engineer@Protex AI, level 4 of 5, the Staff-equivalent band
experience
13+ years in software and infrastructure engineering since October 2013
10+ years in DevOps and Cloud Infrastructure since March 2016
base
Budapest, Hungary · CET/CEST
focus
AWS · Kubernetes · IaC · CI/CD · Automation
superpowers
Infrastructure incident response and post-mortems
Legacy Terraform migrations to stack-based IaC with an ADR program
AWS cost optimization, rightsizing and reserved-savings analysis
ci/cd
Jenkins, GitHub Actions and GitLab CI, on-prem and cloud-native
500+ production deployments at Sonrisa (2020-2025)
certificates
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
IELTS C1
recognition
Star Employee Award, Protex AI Outstanding Contributor Awards, September 2026
interviewing
70+ technical and hiring manager interviews conducted
off the clock
Bouldering, DIY electronics, mechanical keyboards (QMK)

~/experience.md

Experience

Thirteen years, two employers. A project-based consulting company and a SaaS scale-up. They teach very different lessons, and both show up in how I build.

May 2026 to now

Lead DevOps and Cloud Infrastructure Engineer@Protex AI

Current role. I set technical direction, review important pull requests, and write infrastructure code every week.

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.

  • I sit at level 4 of 5, the Staff-equivalent band. Protex has no Staff or Principal title, so this is the same scope other companies call Staff
  • I lead infrastructure incident response and post-mortems, and I am the go-to person for infrastructure issues
  • 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

September 2025 to May 2026

Engineering Manager and Lead DevOps Engineer, Cloud Infrastructure Team at Protex AI

Engineering management and lead DevOps work for the Cloud Infrastructure Team.

  • 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

July 2025 to August 2025

Lead DevOps Engineer, Platform Team at Protex AI

Two months on the Platform Team, before the Cloud Infrastructure Team role.

August 2020 to July 2025

Senior DevOps Engineer and Technical Lead at Sonrisa

Client work from on-prem data centers through to a PCI DSS-compliant AWS identity platform serving an organization of 300+ engineers, and 500+ production deployments.

I left on Senior II, level 8 of a 9-level ladder, where 1 is entry level, 7 is Senior, and 9 is reserved as an honor.

March 2016 to August 2020

DevOps Engineer at Sonrisa

Built the CI/CD practice from Jenkins to cloud-native and moved estates to AWS.

October 2013 to March 2016

Software Engineer at Sonrisa

Frontend and backend work, back when browser compatibility was a real sport. Side quest that never ended: Linux. I use Arch, btw.

// comfort zones

AWS OpenTofu / Terragrunt Ansible Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI ArgoCD Datadog / Snyk / Aikido Cilium Kyverno Trivy Velero Authentik / SOPS Home Assistant / ESPHome Python / Bash

// what former colleagues say

Professionals like him are rare to find. He takes ownership of initiatives from start to finish, ensures they are executed flawlessly, and always speaks up with insightful opinions.

former line manager

Every piece of advice he gave turned out to be spot on. Thanks to his inspiration, I even started building my own homelab.

former direct report

// awards and competitions

  • 1st place, AWS GameDay Infinidash Ride-Hailing (AI/ML track), Vienna 2023
  • 2nd place, AWS GameDay Chaotic Commencement, Vienna 2023
  • 1st place, ISZHOK National Conference of IT Students hackathon, 2013

~/stack.md

Stack

Tools I reach for.

Cloud & Platform

  • AWS: ECS, VPC, IAM, RDS & friends
  • Cloudflare for DNS, CDN and edge stuff
  • Proxmox VE for bare-metal virtualization
  • Linux: Arch as my daily driver

IaC & GitOps

  • OpenTofu / Terraform
  • Terragrunt for sane multi-stack layouts
  • Ansible for everything with an SSH port
  • ArgoCD + Renovate for pull-based ops

Containers & Orchestration

  • Kubernetes: my active deep-dive, Talos-flavored
  • Docker / Podman
  • Helm / Kustomize
  • Gateway API over vintage Ingress

Delivery & CI/CD

  • Jenkins: on-prem and cloud-native, the practice I built at Sonrisa
  • GitHub Actions and GitLab CI for everything since
  • Renovate: dependency updates arrive as pull requests, never as surprises
  • 500+ production deployments

Observability

  • Datadog: production telemetry at a previous role
  • kube-prometheus-stack, Grafana, Loki, Tempo in the lab
  • OpenTelemetry instrumentation
  • Alertmanager paging to Signal, because SMS is not a strategy

Security & Policy

  • Snyk + Aikido: dependency scanning and AppSec programs
  • SOPS + age for secrets in git
  • Kyverno policies, enforced not decorative
  • Trivy for CVE scanning
  • Cilium NetworkPolicy defaults-deny habits

Automation & IoT

  • Python & Bash glue, industrial grade
  • Home Assistant as household kernel
  • ESPHome firmware on self-built devices
  • n8n workflows, 3D-printed enclosures

~/homelab.md

Homelab

“Good news, everyone!” planet-express is a production-grade Kubernetes homelab running on a single bare-metal host, run entirely as code, and where I'm learning Kubernetes properly, bottom-up. Every non-obvious choice has an Architecture Decision Record that explains what was evaluated, what was rejected, and why.

25architecture decisions on record
4-nodeTalos Kubernetes cluster
100%of the cluster is IaC
€0monthly cloud bill
git repo single source of truth opentofu + terragrunt argocd watches git bare metal ryzen 5 8600g · 32gb ddr5-6000 · 990 pro 2tb nvme · 6-bay hdd tiers proxmox ve lxcs · talos vms ×4 talos linux · kubernetes ×4 argocd cilium longhorn cnpg authentik prometheus loki tempo kyverno velero workloads immich · paperless-ngx · n8n // every change reviewed, applied by pipelines, not hands

// case studies

Why Talos, not k3s

Delivered. Minimal, immutable, API-managed Kubernetes nodes, provisioned by OpenTofu. No SSH, no shell, no package manager, so the whole node is defined in git. k3s makes setup faster by bundling components and relaxing defaults, which suits getting started but not a system meant to mirror production.

One public repo, no home network

Delivered. A mirror workflow reads export-ignore paths from .gitattributes and strips them from the published history, then gitleaks scans what is left. It aborts rather than publish if the exclusion list comes back empty.

Secrets you can still read in review

Delivered. SOPS with age encrypts values and leaves YAML field names in plaintext, so a secret change reads as a one-line diff instead of an opaque blob. Kubernetes Secrets are decrypted inside the ArgoCD repo-server by ksops.

Paging through Signal

In progress. The decision record exists, but implementation is not complete. The planned design routes Alertmanager to Signal, which pushes to my phone. Email waits until I open my inbox, which is wrong for a page.
browse the repo read the ADRs

~/automation.md

Home Automation & IoT

Where the homelab philosophy gets a roof, walls and Wi-Fi.

Home Assistant has been running our home since 2017. The fleet passed fifty devices a while ago: self-built ESPHome boards soldered, flashed and boxed in 3D-printed cases, plus off-the-shelf gadgets that behave (local-first, MQTT or Zigbee, no cloud account).

Jenkins, retired

My home jobs used to run on a Jenkins VM. Today the same things run as Home Assistant automations and n8n workflows: lighter, simpler to maintain, no plugin updates on a Sunday.

Upstream contributions

Documentation and translation work for Home Assistant, listed on the official credits page. Small diffs, real project.

Environmental fleet

Temperature, humidity, pressure and CO₂ sensors in every room. Comfort is much easier to tune when you can see the numbers.

Energy everywhere

Plug-level power monitoring on everything that draws current. The dishwasher claims eco mode. The meter disagrees.

Presence-aware lighting

Lights that adjust themselves before anyone looks for a switch, driven by real presence instead of motion timers.

ESPHome everywhere

Every DIY sensor runs ESPHome firmware. YAML in, measurements out, updates over Wi-Fi.

DIY hardware

ESP32 and ESP8266 boards, a soldering iron and a 3D printer. If it exists, it can probably carry a sensor.

Fail-safes first

Every automation has a manual override and sane fallbacks. The house serves its humans, not the other way round.

Empty house protocol

When all our loved ones, including the dog, are out, presence detection starts the robot vacuum. Loud cleaning belongs to an empty flat.

Automate the friction away, but always keep a manual override. Every guest should still find a working light switch.

~/contact.md

Contact

Open to interesting problems, mentoring conversations, or a good debate about whether YAML counts as programming.

email [email protected] github @geripgeri linkedin in/gergely-peidl
NORMAL whoami main utf-8

:q

You made it out.

Congratulations: you found a way to exit Vim without unplugging the machine. You are officially doing better than the 2.7 million people who asked Stack Overflow the same thing.

A monkey hitting random keys for an infinite amount of time still could not have done it.

:smile

   / \__
  (    @\____
  /         O
 /   (_____/
/_____/   U

:h

Documentation

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  w  / b                     next / previous section
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  :smile                     the classic
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