~/max

max@vancouver-island:~$ whoami

Max Onyx

DevOps engineer

I turn clicks into code. Clouds, clusters and pipelines that build themselves, so people can ship and go see the world.

Vancouver Island, BC, Canada
Book a 15-min call Open my shell
years in DevOps
7+
certifications
9
lap around the planet
1
Max Onyx in a brown jacket, looking to the side and smiling
scroll

01 · about

If your DevOps creates infrastructure by clicking, you do not have a DevOps engineer.

I'm Max: a DevOps and platform engineer who believes everything that has an API should be configured as code. Since 2019 I have built and run clouds, Kubernetes clusters and delivery pipelines for startups, enterprises, an ad-tech private cloud of about 400 hosts and a government fraud-detection platform.

Most of my employers were outsourcing companies, so I learned to land in an unfamiliar system, read it like an X-ray and make it boring: simple, documented, reproducible. My test for every decision is one question: how will this feel to maintain in two years?

These days I also use AI-assisted coding to go end to end: from the Terraform module to the frontend that sits on top of it.

principles.yaml
# my operating principles
everything_as_code: true
clickops: forbidden
credentials: short_lived  # OIDC, no keys
environments:
  - dev
  - staging
  - prod       # one module, three stacks
complexity: "only when it pays rent"
rollback: git revert
on_call: boring      # the goal

02 · automation

I automate everything. Then I automate the automation.

A change I make travels the same road every time: commit, test, plan, apply, deploy, observe. No console clicks, no snowflake servers, no "it works on my laptop".

  1. 01commitgit push to a protected branch
  2. 02testlint, unit and end-to-end tests
  3. 03planterraform plan, reviewed like code
  4. 04applyapplied by CI through OIDC, no keys
  5. 05deployGitOps: ArgoCD or Vercel ships it
  6. 06observeDatadog dashboards, alerts and RUM
  1. open the cloud console
  2. click 47 buttons
  3. forget which ones
  4. copy settings to staging by hand
  5. drift appears
  6. nobody knows why prod is different
  1. terraform plan
  2. review the diff in a pull request
  3. CI applies it with short-lived credentials
  4. staging and prod come from one module
  5. drift check runs every week
  6. rollback = git revert

Results from real projects

03 · toolbox

The stack I reach for

Battle-tested, boring in the best way, and easy to hire for.

  • Terraform
  • Terragrunt
  • AWS
  • Kubernetes
  • EKS
  • Helm
  • ArgoCD
  • GitHub Actions
  • Jenkins
  • CircleCI
  • GitLab CI
  • Datadog
  • Prometheus
  • Grafana
  • Ansible
  • Packer
  • Vault
  • Docker
  • Linux
  • Python
  • Node.js
  • Bash
  • Route 53
  • Vercel

04 · certified

Nine certifications, one habit: learn it properly

Five AWS badges, both Kubernetes exams (CKA and CKS), Terraform and Cisco networking.

Verify on Credly

05 · career

Where I've shipped

$ git log --oneline --graph career

  1. f914c15

    · My own small businesses

    Micro-business entrepreneur

    Since March 2026 I launch and run my own small businesses, automated the same way I build platforms: sites, bookings and ads as code.

  2. e46dd70

    · Mimecast

    Senior DevOps Engineer (embedded)

    Built a greenfield platform after the acquisition: Terraform, EKS with GitOps through ArgoCD, secure CI/CD, on-call and incident response.

  3. 012d83c

    · Elevate Security

    DevOps Engineer, the only one

    Owned AWS, Terraform and Terragrunt, Kubernetes and monitoring end to end; delivered multi-region; the startup was acquired by Mimecast.

  4. b471d48

    · SHALB

    DevOps Engineer

    A new client and a new toolset every three months: AWS and on-prem, greenfield and legacy.

  5. ed340c8

    · Illumin

    Senior Automation Engineer

    A private cloud of about 400 bare-metal and virtual hosts in three regions; PXE provisioning, Terraform on vSphere, Kubernetes with Ansible.

  6. 07b3f53

    · Ministry of Finance of Ukraine

    Ops / DevOps Engineer

    Rebuilt monitoring and logging for a fraud-detection platform in a locked-down network; promoted after one month.

  7. 2e4555d

    · Darwin Global Partners · AM-BITS

    Web, SEO and support engineer

    Where it started: LAMP sites and technical SEO, then on-call L1–L3 support for big-data platforms.

06 · talents

More than one terminal open

Engineering is my bread. These are the rest of the sandwich.

07 · travel

Around the world, mostly on my thumb

I have travelled around the globe and hitchhiked across continents, filming it for my YouTube channel. Today home base is Vancouver Island, between the Pacific and the rainforest.

mode
hitchhiking, mostly
loop
a full circle around the planet
base
Vancouver Island, British Columbia
Watch Hello World Trip
Home: Vancouver IslandRound-the-world routedrag to spin the globe

08 · shell

Talk to my shell

Type a command or tap one below. Try help.

max@vancouver-island: ~

09 · contact

Let's build something that runs itself

Platform work, a Terraform rescue, a talk, or a travel story: write to me.

me@maxim.run Book a 15-minute call

Find me elsewhere