Makariy Balashov

Profile

Platform engineer who builds and improves the tooling other engineers ship on. I have spent the last few years on Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure from both sides: developing a managed Kubernetes service — writing the service and operating the thousands of customer clusters running on it — and now building the internal platform that hides all of that from product teams.

Work experience

1. Technokratos

   Nov 2025 — now

   Team Lead, Internal Development Platform

   • Lead the team behind the internal development platform.
   • The platform lets engineers click the infrastructure they need into existence — Kubernetes clusters, managed databases, load balancers — and deploy their applications onto it.

2. Yandex Cloud

   May 2023 — Nov 2025

   Senior SRE

   • Developed Managed Service for Kubernetes — feature and reliability work in Go on the service itself, alongside running it in production.
   • Led the strategic Release Improvements initiative — drove systematic release process improvements for the whole mk8s team, creating long-term value through process optimisation.
   • Deployed MK8S in the Kazakhstan region — ran the full deployment from MVP to GA, including infrastructure setup, monitoring, alerting, E2E testing and team knowledge transfer.
   • Created, improved and optimised CI/CD pipelines — built new deployment pipelines, modernised existing ones, standardised and parallelised deployment processes, cutting release time by roughly 30%.
   • Modernised infrastructure security and access — migrated all service workloads to oslogin across every environment and implemented CIS Benchmark compliance.
   • Maintained 5,000+ client clusters — on-duty monitoring, resolving critical incidents, and building a duty tool that made operations easier.
   • Cross-team collaboration — coordinated with development and infrastructure teams, ran knowledge sharing sessions and mentored team members.
   • Contributed to the upstream Cilium project.

   Most used: Go, Kubernetes, Terraform, TeamCity, Spinnaker, Helm

3. Ak Bars Digital

   Jul 2022 — 2023

   SRE

   • Researched and rolled out kube-native tooling: Kyverno, cert-manager, Cilium, Dex.
   • Implemented GitOps practices.
   • Improved IaC practices.

   Most used: Kubernetes, ArgoCD, Helm, Ansible, Vault, Terraform

4. Chestny Znak

   Mar 2021 — 2022

   DevOps

   • Developed and improved CI/CD, integrated autotests, migrated from Helm 2 to Helm 3.
   • Built tools for automating routine tasks in Go, Rust and Bash.
   • Supported test environments (K8s, HBase, Phoenix, Postgres, Kafka, Cassandra).

   Most used: GitLab CI, Kubernetes, Helm, Nginx

5. Deutsche Telekom IT Solutions (T-Systems)

   Oct 2020 — 2021

   Trainee DevOps

   Most used: GitLab CI, Helm, Docker, Kubernetes, Nginx, Ansible, Git, Gradle, Maven, Bash, Postgres

Selected writing & talks

• Scheduling GPU workloads in Kubernetes: from standard mechanisms to custom solutions2025 · Habr (Russian original) · DevOops 2025 · k8s-scheduler-based-on-gpu
• Kyverno: a PodSecurityPolicy replacement, or something more?2023 · Habr (Russian original)

Education