Zara Papoyan - Cloud Platform Architect

Zara Papoyan

Cloud Platform Architect — Kubernetes • Terraform • CI/CD • Platform Engineering • Cloud Infrastructure

About

I am a Cloud Platform Architect with over 17 years of experience designing and operating scalable cloud infrastructure and automation platforms. My work focuses on building reliable, secure, and highly automated systems that enable engineering teams to move faster while maintaining operational stability.

I specialize in Kubernetes platforms, infrastructure as code with Terraform, CI/CD systems, cloud architecture, and reliability engineering across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Throughout my career I have led initiatives that transformed complex manual operations into streamlined automated platforms, significantly improving deployment velocity and system reliability.

Core Competencies

  • Platform Engineering: Kubernetes (EKS/GKE), Helm, Argo CD, GitOps, service onboarding
  • Infrastructure as Code: Terraform modules, environment patterns, policy-as-code guardrails
  • CI/CD & Automation: pipelines, release automation, build/test/deploy workflows
  • Reliability Engineering: SLIs/SLOs, incident response, runbooks, postmortems
  • Observability: metrics/logs/traces, alerting strategy, operational dashboards
  • Security & Access: IAM strategy, secrets management, least privilege, auditing

Focus Areas

  • Reducing operational toil through automation, standardization, and paved roads
  • Improving deployment safety via GitOps, progressive delivery, and guardrails
  • Hardening cloud environments with pragmatic security controls

Professional Profiles

Keywords (for search)

Zara Papoyan, Cloud Platform Architect, Platform Engineering, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, GKE, EKS, Helm, Argo CD, GitOps, CI/CD, Observability.

Contact

For professional inquiries, please connect via LinkedIn.

Professional Recommendations

“Zara is a brilliant System Engineer - well educated, experienced. It was a real honor for me to work with Zara.”

Ihor Piddubnyak
July 2023

“Zara was knowledgeable, easy to work with, and one of the go-to people to solve complex problems. I highly recommend Zara for any technical role due to her skills (both technical and interpersonal).”

Julio Villarreal Pelegrino
Director, Technology & GTM, Global Services @ Red Hat · July 2023

“Zara was a huge help during a difficult transition and went the extra mile to ensure issues were handled swiftly with minimal customer impact. She is skilled, dedicated, and easy to work with.”

Andrew Stangl
Senior Site Reliability Engineer · September 2022

“Zara showed herself as a high-level system administrator who knows Linux, DNS, and web hosting. Zara is very responsible and it is a real pleasure to work with her.”

Yuriy Korostyshevskyy
Principal Technical Project Manager / Solution Architect · September 2022

Recommendations sourced from professional colleagues (LinkedIn).