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Index

Omar Elbanby

Work

Eight roles across seven organisations. Open one to see what it actually involved.

  1. 2025

    Plotly

    Senior Platform Engineer Jan 2025 — present

    Shaping the technical direction of a major enterprise platform revamp, and leading the backup and restore work behind it.

    • Advocated early for the architectural changes that later supported seven-figure revenue impact during beta adoption.
    • Worked directly with early enterprise customers during beta, feeding what they said back into product iteration and reprioritising platform and reliability work.
    • Led a focused team of engineers on backup and restore, owning design, planning, coordination, and technical direction.
    • Delivered a Kubernetes-native backup and restore orchestration system for reliable recovery across distributed stateful systems in enterprise environments.
    • Make the architectural and delivery trade-offs that simplify complex systems while keeping them safe to evolve and performant at scale.
  2. 2023

    Plotly

    Platform Engineer Jul 2023 — Jan 2025

    Built the foundation the team used to reason about how the platform behaved under real load.

    • Led the design of a platform-wide observability, load-testing, and profiling foundation.
    • Partnered with the VP of Engineering to turn dashboards and health signals into decision gates for upgrades, releases, and platform changes.
    • Designed a service-aware health evaluation system on a hub-and-spoke model, letting each service define what healthy means while still allowing central assessment.
    • Built dependency-aware diagnostics to isolate root causes across distributed systems and verify correctness during platform upgrades.
    • Developed Kubernetes operators and controllers to manage resource migrations and keep upgrades backward compatible.
    • Optimised Kubernetes runtime performance, increasing effective memory capacity by 26% and CPU efficiency by 34%.
  3. 2022

    ExpertPoint Media

    Founder Aug 2022 — Jul 2023 · Toronto, remote

    An early-stage media platform testing whether pluralistic, expert-driven analysis could reduce ideological polarisation. Owned vision, operating model, validation, and system design end to end.

    • Defined the product vision, editorial principles, and operating model for multi-perspective analysis.
    • Led a small cross-functional group across journalism, policy research, and design, aligning contributors around shared goals.
    • Ran 30+ customer discovery interviews and read the academic research on ideological mapping to inform product direction.
    • Designed the system with Event Storming and Domain-Driven Design, aligning editorial intent with clear architectural boundaries.
    • Built an initial cloud-native platform with explicit domain separation, so experimentation did not cost clarity.
  4. 2021

    Allergan Data Labs

    Cloud Infrastructure Engineer (consultant) Oct 2021 — Sep 2022

    Embedded to evolve a multi-tenant Kubernetes platform: workflow orchestration, security boundaries, and infrastructure quality.

    • Took ownership of reliability problems in event-driven workflows, resolving production issues in Argo Events and improving execution behaviour beyond the immediate system.
    • Introduced structured workflow orchestration for complex, tenant-scoped cases, establishing clearer execution boundaries and access controls.
    • Led a security initiative to encrypt Kubernetes secrets end to end with SOPS and AWS KMS, so secrets stayed unreadable without explicit authorisation even if reached at rest.
    • Automated CloudFront CDN cache management through CI/CD, cutting operational overhead and release friction.
    • Supported large-scale event-driven traffic during promotional spikes — first-hand exposure to serverless cold starts, scaling behaviour, and pre-warming under real load.

  5. Canada Life

    Senior DevOps Engineer (consultant) Jul 2021 — Dec 2021

    Brought in to modernise and extend a CI/CD platform the whole organisation relied on, opening up new delivery, security, and scalability capabilities.

    • Designed and built a shared CI/CD standard library that became the long-term foundation for pipeline integrations and extensibility.
    • Partnered with the Director to evolve pipeline architecture for clarity, reliability, and long-term maintainability.
    • Refactored complex workflows into predictable, easier-to-operate execution paths that supported new capabilities.
    • Introduced highly available Kubernetes-based build agents, improving pipeline resilience and scalability.
    • Improved build performance and developer feedback loops through container optimisation and lightweight caching.
    • Strengthened pipeline security and compliance with automated scanning and policy-as-code.
  6. 2020

    Sonnet Insurance

    DevOps Engineer Jul 2020 — Jul 2021 · Toronto

    Owned production reliability and recovery for a high-traffic platform serving millions of users, focused on reducing operational risk and on-call burden.

    • Improved production recovery time 4×, from around three hours to under 45 minutes, through automated recovery workflows — which took a substantial amount of on-call load off the whole rotation.
    • Established a GitOps-driven operating model for reproducibility, auditability, and safe collaboration.
    • Designed production observability for faster diagnosis and more predictable incident response.
    • Reduced configuration risk by standardising and automating large volumes of legacy setup.
    • Designed CI/CD execution patterns that saved engineering time and improved operational clarity.

  7. Manulife

    Platform Engineer Jan 2020 — Jun 2020 · Waterloo, Ontario
    • Led the migration of multiple teams to custom Groovy-based Jenkins pipelines, improving the flexibility and scalability of their CI/CD workflows.
    • Developed a Node.js and MongoDB application to calculate DevOps maturity levels, giving teams something actionable to improve against.
    • Automated LDAP synchronisation with Grafana using Node.js, improving efficiency and consistency in user access management.
    • Administered SonarQube, Artifactory, and Blackduck for quality, security, and compliance across the organisation.
  8. 2018

    VeganHive

    Lead Infrastructure Engineer Dec 2018 — Jul 2021 · Toronto

    Progressed into the infrastructure lead role, establishing the platform, operational, and security foundations that let the startup scale engineering velocity safely.

    • Owned the infrastructure roadmap, platform capabilities, and scaling strategy as the company grew.
    • Established a GitOps infrastructure model for reproducibility, auditability, and change management.
    • Designed and operated Kubernetes platforms supporting stateful distributed systems — Kafka, ZooKeeper, and Neo4j.
    • Built the operational foundations that made the path from experimentation to production reliable.
    • Introduced observability, infrastructure testing, and chaos engineering to improve resilience and confidence in change.
    • Established the company's IT and infrastructure security baseline, reducing long-term operational risk.

Founded

  • Payvo

    Technical Founder

    Picking the best credit card for every purchase automatically, so you'd maximise rewards without thinking about it.

  • AssetWarden

    see what we built (opens in a new tab)
    Technical Founder

    An AI-first computerised maintenance management system for labs and research facilities — equipment tracking, service scheduling, and automated cost recovery.