Amal Zacharia

Senior Platform & Infrastructure Engineer

Self-taught. I've held 200,000+ production connections above a contractual uptime floor. Solo, end to end.

About

Self-taught Senior Platform & Infrastructure Engineer, 6+ years owning distributed systems, bare-metal Kubernetes, and high-concurrency backends for high-scale community platforms and global startups. No CS degree; the systems in production are the credential.

The proof: two years keeping 200,000+ concurrent WebSocket connections above a hard, contractual 75% uptime floor, as a solo operator, on infrastructure I built and ran myself. Separately, migrated production workloads off managed cloud onto self-hosted bare-metal Kubernetes, cutting infrastructure spend by 90%.

I work best where ownership is total and the problem is hard. No unnecessary escalation, just the system, the problem, and a solution by morning.

I've spent years as the engineer clients retained long term, paid a premium to keep, and relied on when things broke at the worst possible time: first as an independent consultant, then as co-founder and lead engineer at Fynova Labs, where I helped grow a five-person team around that same standard. Now I'm building PeakRooms, a direct booking channel for independent hotels, villas, and homestays, a way to take a booking without handing 15–30% of it to an OTA.

Curious how any of this actually happened? Read the full story, or just drop me a note.

Story

  1. 01

    How It Started (2018)

    I was 15, looking for a clan. What I found instead was the beginning of everything.

  2. 02

    First Lines of Code (2019)

    Still on a phone, still no PC. But I wanted to build something myself, not run someone else's code.

  3. 03

    The Year Everything Accelerated (2020)

    I stopped experimenting and started building for real. Kubernetes, TypeScript, real clients, all in one year.

  4. 04

    Scale, Systems and New Clients (2021)

    A product idea, a race condition I'd never seen before, and the mental model that would become proper distributed systems architecture.

Experience

  1. Jun 2026 — Present

    Building a direct booking channel for independent hotels, villas, and homestays: a way to take a booking without handing 15–30% of it to an OTA. Owning the product and infrastructure end to end.

    • Go
    • Kubernetes
    • PostgreSQL
    • TypeScript
  2. Apr 2025 — Present

    Co-founded a technical agency scaling to a cross-functional team of 5. Owned full-lifecycle backend and infrastructure architecture for long-term clients. Implemented GitOps workflows with ephemeral container builds per feature branch. Managed Kubernetes clusters on rke2 with Cilium for network policy enforcement.

    • Go
    • rke2
    • Kubernetes
    • Cilium
    • Docker
    • GitHub Actions
    • Terraform
    • Ansible
  3. Apr 2020 — Apr 2025

    Delivered backend systems and infrastructure for international clients across high-scale community platforms and AI startups. Migrated production workloads from managed cloud to self-hosted k3s on bare metal reducing infrastructure costs by 90%. Owned OS provisioning, firewall hardening, and CI/CD automation using GitHub Actions and GHCR.

    • Go
    • k3s
    • Kubernetes
    • Rancher
    • Prometheus
    • Grafana
    • Linux
    • GitHub Actions

Articles

  1. 200,000 Connections. One Contractual Floor. Two Years.

    2026

    How I held 200,000 persistent WebSocket connections above a hard 75% uptime floor for two years, as a solo operator, on a cluster I was setting up for the first time.

  2. Five Clusters. Five Lessons. One Production System.

    2026

    How I rebuilt my Kubernetes infrastructure five times, and what each version taught me.

    Thumbnail for Five Clusters. Five Lessons. One Production System.