Cover Letter — Anton Novikov

Hi,

Anton Novikov, Senior DevOps Engineer & SecOps, 8 years in infrastructure. Currently full-time at Finstar Financial Group, remote from Da Nang, Vietnam.

I own the AWS/EKS reference architecture at Finstar, a multi-country lending fintech — 25 clusters across 6 AWS accounts and 5 regions (Africa, Asia-Pacific, Europe), 100% provisioned via Terraform and a shared Helm library chart, GitOps via ArgoCD and FluxCD. Recent work: built a production EKS cluster from zero for the Africa DWH team (networking, cross-account IAM, ArgoCD bootstrap, StarRocks), rolled out the Linkerd service mesh across two regions, and added graceful shutdown support to the shared Helm chart used by every team's 10+ clusters. I also built and maintain the internal Kubernetes dashboard the platform and dev teams use daily instead of kubectl. FinOps is part of the job too — Karpenter consolidation policies keep compute spend flat as the fleet grows.

I also write the tooling I need: a FastAPI dashboard showing live cluster health across environments, a custom Alertmanager webhook with per-team routing, a Trivy→SonarQube converter so security findings surface outside the pipeline, Markdown→Confluence auto-sync to keep docs from going stale. If I'm doing something by hand twice, I automate it.

Before Finstar, I spent four years at Sirena-Travel — a Russian GDS at Amadeus/Sabre scale (500+ VMs, 24/7) — moving across three of its products and owning the infrastructure end to end on each: FluxCD v2 hub-and-spoke GitOps for MixVel's agent-facing GDS, Red Rose Traveltech's EU booking platform built from an empty Yandex Cloud account, and modernizing the parent GDS itself — CI/CD from scratch, deploy time from hours to under 10 minutes, MTTR from 120 to 20 minutes. In parallel, 15 months as the sole DevOps engineer at Flowerave, a ticketing startup, building everything from zero with zero data loss.

I like building things. Not just keeping them alive — actually building them. I pick up new stacks fast, I'm comfortable owning infra without hand-holding, and I find the automation work genuinely interesting.

Let me know if you want to talk.

Anton Novikov me@antonnovikov.com antonnovikov.com