Behzad Kianbakht
● Open to UK & Europe opportunities

Behzad Kianbakht

Senior Platform Engineer & Site Reliability Engineer

12+ years designing and operating large-scale, highly available infrastructure in telecommunications. Established the largest SRE practice in the MTN Group — owning reliability for 5,000+ hosts and 1,500+ production services.

Kubernetes Terraform Ansible Prometheus Grafana ELK Stack GitLab CI/CD Python SLO / SLA Docker RKE2 · Rancher IEEE Published
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12+ yrs
Total experience
↗ Senior level
5K+
Infrastructure hosts managed
↗ Largest in MTN Group
80%
Deployment effort reduced
↗ via automation
40%
Fewer major incidents
↗ SLO-driven
0+
Infrastructure Hosts
0+
Production Services
0+
Real-time Monitored
0%
Deployment Savings
0%
Incident Reduction
0%
Risk Coverage (ML)
Career roadmap

From embedded systems to platform engineering

A decade of continuous evolution across hardware, networking, and cloud-native infrastructure.

2020
MTN Irancell
Senior Specialist — Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
Present
Jul 2020 — Present  •  5+ years
Established and led the largest SRE practice in the entire MTN Group, responsible for the full reliability lifecycle of the MTN Irancell production estate.
  • Architected observability platform (Zabbix, ELK, Prometheus, Grafana) on Kubernetes (RKE2/Rancher) with Helm Charts — 80% reduction in provisioning effort
  • Defined SLOs, error budgets & on-call runbooks; drove 40% fewer major incidents via proactive alerting & blameless postmortems
  • Engineered Python/Bash automation integrating REST, SOAP, SNMP with MySQL, MongoDB, Oracle — monitoring 230+ services via GitLab CI/CD
  • Built predictive ML models (pandas, scikit-learn) covering 85% of high-business-impact failure scenarios before production impact
  • Automated end-to-end incident lifecycle via Jira API — alert → ticket → escalation → closure, significantly reducing MTTR
  • Led IaC deployments with Ansible playbooks & Terraform modules across hybrid cloud and on-premises environments
▲ 80% efficiency ▲ 40% fewer incidents ▲ 85% risk coverage
KubernetesRKE2Rancher HelmTerraformAnsible PrometheusGrafanaELK GitLab CI/CDPythonscikit-learn
2019
Amin Optical Transmission Network
Software Engineer
Networking & ML
Jan 2019 — Jul 2020  •  18 months
Shifted from hardware-level networking to software-defined networking, building ML-driven automation for optical network management.
  • Built Python-based automated topology discovery for 250+ network nodes and links, exposed via FastAPI for NMS/OSS integration
  • Developed ML-driven routing & wavelength assignment engine (ILP optimisation) — 70% improvement in resource utilisation
  • Implemented SDN controller with Northbound RESTCONF and Southbound NETCONF/OpenFlow interfaces — eliminated CLI-based configuration
▲ 70% resource efficiency ▲ 250+ nodes automated
PythonFastAPISDN RESTCONFNETCONFOpenFlow scikit-learnILP
2017
FiberHome Telecommunication Technologies
Software Developer
Network Software
Jun 2017 — Mar 2019  •  21 months
Deep systems programming for optical network switching — routing algorithm design and protocol module optimisation.
  • Developed concurrent fault-tolerant routing algorithm in embedded C for ASON optical platform — sustained 99.9% uptime
  • Refactored OSPF and CSPF routing modules — achieved 40% throughput improvement and 20% latency reduction
▲ 99.9% uptime ▲ 40% throughput ▼ 20% latency
Embedded COSPFCSPF ASONNetwork Algorithms
2015
Electronics Company
Embedded Systems Designer
Foundation
Aug 2015 — Feb 2017  •  18 months
Built the engineering foundation — hardware design, signal processing, and low-level firmware for aviation-grade systems.
  • Designed aviation-grade Altitude Encoder (MSP-430) with barometric pressure processing for Mode C transponder compliance
  • Developed TCP/UDP protocol stacks on FPGA (Wiznet 5500) and Air Data Computer in VHDL/MicroBlaze C++
  • Delivered 10-layer PCB in Altium Designer, validated with HyperLynx signal integrity analysis
MSP-430FPGAVHDL C++AltiumPCB Design
2008
Academic Foundation
B.Sc. Electronic Engineering → M.Sc. Telecommunication Engineering
Education
2008 — 2020  •  Azad University
From undergraduate electronics to postgraduate telecom research — culminating in an IEEE-published paper on Massive MIMO resource allocation.
M.Sc. 16.77/20B.Sc. 15.48/20 IEEE Publication ↗Cell-Free Massive MIMOICEE 2020
Technical skills

Core competencies

Depth across platform engineering, observability, automation, and systems programming.

▲
Container & Orchestration
Kubernetes (RKE2, Rancher)95%
Helm Charts90%
Docker92%
OpenStack80%
■
Infrastructure as Code
Ansible92%
Terraform88%
GitOps85%
●
CI/CD & Automation
GitLab CI/CD95%
Jenkins80%
Python (automation)93%
Bash / Shell90%
○
Observability Stack
Prometheus & Grafana95%
ELK Stack90%
Zabbix88%
△
Reliability Engineering
SLO / SLA / Error Budgets90%
Incident Response / On-call92%
Capacity Planning85%
◆
ML & Data
pandas & scikit-learn85%
Predictive Modelling80%
FastAPI82%
Education & research

Academic background

M.Sc. Telecommunication Engineering
Azad University, Central Tehran Branch
2018 – 2020
★ Grade: 16.77 / 20
IEEE Publication

Distributed and Centralized Subcarrier-based Precoding for Cell-Free Massive MIMO Network — ICEE 2020 ↗

B.Sc. Electronic Engineering
Azad University, Science and Research Branch
2008 – 2012
★ Grade: 15.48 / 20
Certifications
2024
Introduction to DevOps
IBM
2023
Dorado V3/V4 Storage Deployment & Management
Huawei
2022
OpenStack Administrator
MTN Irancell – Douran
2022
Docker Container
MTN Irancell – Douran
2021
ITIL Foundation V4
MTN Irancell – Sematec
2020
Python Programming
Tehran University (MaktabKhone)
2014
FPGA Programming
Shiraz University
Contact

Let's talk

Open to senior Platform / SRE / DevOps roles in the UK and Europe.

✉
Email
b.kianbakht@gmail.com
🔗
LinkedIn
linkedin.com/in/b-kianbakht
🌎
Target location
UK / Europe
✓
Visa
Sponsorship welcome

Available for new opportunities

Seeking Senior Platform Engineer, SRE, DevOps, or Automation Engineer roles in the UK & Europe

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