Hi, I'm Lope.
I build the golden path for engineering teams.
Platform Infrastructure Lead with 15+ years scaling global systems. I sit where high-scale reliability meets aggressive cost efficiency — today for 25 million monthly active users at GoodNotes.
Impact at a glance
- 25M monthly active users supported
- $0.16 infra unit cost / user / month
- 30+ global Kubernetes clusters
- 3–5B log events processed daily
01 — About
I move to where the business impact is greatest.
I've been one of the first 30 engineers at companies that went on to scale past 200 engineers — twice. That vantage point taught me that platform work is really product work: the internal developer experience decides how fast a company can ship.
My path followed the impact: mobile engineering, then distributed systems architecture, and now platform infrastructure economics. Today I lead the Platform Infrastructure team at GoodNotes, where a team of four supports 300+ developers across Hong Kong, London, SEA and Canada.
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Platform strategy
Golden-path defaults with ArgoCD, Argo Rollouts, Istio and Atlantis — so shipping is the easy option and stability is the default.
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FinOps
Unit economics wired into Backstage, $4.6m in annualised savings, and $40m+ of supplier contracts projected and negotiated.
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Reliability & security
Follow-the-sun SRE, zero-trust access, and authorship of the majority of ISO 27001 and SOC 2 controls.
02 — Experience
Fifteen years, six companies, one throughline.
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Platform Infrastructure Team Lead
Built the cloud platform behind 25M monthly active users from the ground up, and turned infrastructure spend into a managed, forecastable line item.
- Architected shared infrastructure to a highly optimised unit cost of ~$0.16 per user per month.
- Standardised deployments on golden-path patterns (ArgoCD, Argo Rollouts, Istio, Atlantis), cutting time-to-market without trading away stability.
- Engineered a Loki / Grafana / Mimir observability platform with a Kafka streaming pipeline handling 3–5B daily log events into an Apache Iceberg data lake on S3.
- Delivered $4.6m in annualised savings and negotiated $40m+ in supplier contracts.
- Grew a team of four DevOps engineers supporting 300+ developers and 30+ global Kubernetes clusters — a 75:1 developer-to-operator ratio.
- Shifted security left with Trivy, AWS Config and SIEM workflows; authored the majority of ISO 27001 and SOC 2 controls and ran the HackerOne bug bounty.
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Senior Site Reliability Engineer II
Kept multi-cloud, multi-version Kubernetes and the data platform healthy across three time zones.
- Ran GKE, EKS and kops clusters for monitoring and high availability.
- Operated Kafka, Redshift and Spark clusters alongside Go services.
- Shared a 24/7 follow-the-sun on-call rotation across Singapore, Beijing and San Francisco.
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SRE / DevOps → Software Architect → Lead → Senior Engineer
Four years and four roles, from full-stack product engineering to running reliability for the whole platform.
- Introduced Google-style SRE practice: SLIs around apdex, P90 latency and error rate, plus blameless post-mortems.
- Led the migration from Elastic Beanstalk to Kubernetes and built deploy pipelines on Drone, Helm and Terraform.
- Drove major AWS changes — RDS upgrades, WAF-based DDoS mitigation, and a Fivetran to AWS DMS migration.
- As architect, used Domain-Driven Design and event sourcing to shape SOA solutions for logistics and warehousing.
- Launched the Attractions/Movies vertical on a tight timeline, and shipped the Partner, Shopper, Driver and Consumer Android apps.
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Lead Android Developer
Built fitness, phone-blocking and business-card apps for an Australian client.
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Full Stack Engineer — first employee
Shipped a barcode-scanning price comparison app and the Django platform behind it.
- Built and released the Android app: barcode scanning with crowd-sourced nearby pricing.
- Built Django APIs, admin tooling and geolocation pages; upgraded search to Solr and added OCR-based text extraction with Tesseract.
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Software Engineer
Graduated top 10 of the Exist Code Camp, then became one of the company's first Android developers.
- Shipped payment and news apps for Globe GCash and Philstar — two of the Philippines' largest brands.
03 — Skills
What I reach for.
Cloud & IaC
Data & observability
FinOps
Security & governance
Engineering leadership
04 — Credentials
Certifications & education.
Certifications
- AWS Certified SysOps Administrator — Associate
- FinOps Certified: FinOps for AI
- Introduction to Machine Learning in Production
- Machine Learning Data Lifecycle in Production
- Machine Learning Foundations: A Case Study Approach
Education
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University of the Philippines
Non-degree, Computer Science · 2013 -
Xavier University — Ateneo de Cagayan
BS Computer Science · 2007–2011
Languages
- English — full professional
- Filipino — native
05 — Contact
Let's talk platforms, scale, or cloud bills.
I'm always happy to compare notes on golden paths, SRE practice and FinOps — whether or not there's a role attached.