Vladimir Frolkin
North Carolina, United States
Senior DevOps Engineer at Digital Wave Technology
Vladimir Frolkin is a highly accomplished Senior DevOps Engineer with over five years of specialized experience architecting cloud-native infrastructure for high-scale AI-driven platforms and fintech applications. Currently serving as the sole DevOps specialist at Digital Wave Technology since October 2024, he supports approximately 100 team members while making all critical infrastructure decisions for an American AI solutions company and simultaneously developing his own DevOps outsourcing consultancy.
At Digital Wave Technology, Vladimir re-architected the edge layer by replacing bespoke proxy solutions with NGINX Ingress, simplifying routing and enabling independent service deployment. He rebuilt the entire infrastructure using Terraform/Terragrunt and Ansible, reducing cluster spin-up time by 88%—from four hours to 30 minutes—while achieving 100% idempotency. He deployed a unified observability stack using Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and CloudWatch/SNS, providing real-time SLO dashboards for business teams. Within six months, he fully automated infrastructure provisioning and built monitoring systems from scratch.
His breakthrough role came at Tabby (September 2022 - September 2024), a $3.3 billion Dubai-based fintech startup serving over 10 million users and 30,000+ merchants. He operated multi-region Google Kubernetes Engine infrastructure spanning 260+ nodes, built an IAM/RBAC portal and self-service environment access system that reduced onboarding time by 80%, and created an internal UI for Pub/Sub replay and tracing. His integration of HashiCorp Vault and hardened base images closed critical CVEs before deployment, strengthening security for millions of financial transactions.
At ITKey (May 2021 - October 2022), Vladimir stood up several bare-metal OpenStack clouds via Ansible Kolla, bringing first tenant VMs live within 24 hours of hardware handover. He curated migration of approximately 30 production projects into new regions and solo-migrated one high-traffic service with zero downtime. His contribution of an auto-evacuator patch to the distribution enabled automatic live migration of VMs during compute-node failures, reducing unplanned downtime by over 90%.
As System Engineer at Omnicomm (August 2019 - May 2021), he provided L2 support for approximately 120 Linux servers running MySQL, PostgreSQL, and ClickHouse. He authored over 20 runbooks enabling Tier-1 teams to resolve issues without escalation and wrote Ansible playbooks and GitLab CI jobs that automated deployment tasks while preparing groundwork with Docker/Kubernetes lab clusters.
At Digital Wave Technology, Vladimir re-architected the edge layer by replacing bespoke proxy solutions with NGINX Ingress, simplifying routing and enabling independent service deployment. He rebuilt the entire infrastructure using Terraform/Terragrunt and Ansible, reducing cluster spin-up time by 88%—from four hours to 30 minutes—while achieving 100% idempotency. He deployed a unified observability stack using Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and CloudWatch/SNS, providing real-time SLO dashboards for business teams. Within six months, he fully automated infrastructure provisioning and built monitoring systems from scratch.
His breakthrough role came at Tabby (September 2022 - September 2024), a $3.3 billion Dubai-based fintech startup serving over 10 million users and 30,000+ merchants. He operated multi-region Google Kubernetes Engine infrastructure spanning 260+ nodes, built an IAM/RBAC portal and self-service environment access system that reduced onboarding time by 80%, and created an internal UI for Pub/Sub replay and tracing. His integration of HashiCorp Vault and hardened base images closed critical CVEs before deployment, strengthening security for millions of financial transactions.
At ITKey (May 2021 - October 2022), Vladimir stood up several bare-metal OpenStack clouds via Ansible Kolla, bringing first tenant VMs live within 24 hours of hardware handover. He curated migration of approximately 30 production projects into new regions and solo-migrated one high-traffic service with zero downtime. His contribution of an auto-evacuator patch to the distribution enabled automatic live migration of VMs during compute-node failures, reducing unplanned downtime by over 90%.
As System Engineer at Omnicomm (August 2019 - May 2021), he provided L2 support for approximately 120 Linux servers running MySQL, PostgreSQL, and ClickHouse. He authored over 20 runbooks enabling Tier-1 teams to resolve issues without escalation and wrote Ansible playbooks and GitLab CI jobs that automated deployment tasks while preparing groundwork with Docker/Kubernetes lab clusters.
Vladimir's community engagement includes delivering a DevOps lecture at AGBU (Armenian General Benevolent Union), speaking at peredelano.conf on public cloud technologies, and serving as jury member at QA Mind Contest supported by EPAM, AGBU, and Tabby. His open-source Ansible role continues receiving GitHub stars over three years after publication. His thought leadership extends through publications in ITWeek.ru and Novosti IT Kanala, interviews on VC.ru, and an active YouTube channel sharing infrastructure architecture knowledge.
In late 2024, he founded his own DevOps outsourcing company, successfully recruiting team members based on trust in his technical vision. His measurable business impact includes creating infrastructure enabling clients to begin commercial operations with AI solutions, redesigning architecture so deployment failures affect only individual microservices rather than all services simultaneously, and consistently reducing deployment times by 80-90%.
Vladimir holds a Bachelor's degree in Law from IGUMO & IT Moscow with professional English proficiency and native Russian fluency. His technical expertise spans Terraform/Terragrunt, Ansible, Kubernetes, GKE, NGINX Ingress, Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, HashiCorp Vault, OpenStack, GitLab CI, Docker, Google Cloud, and AWS.
What distinguishes Vladimir is his ability to operate as sole DevOps specialist in high-growth companies, delivering systems that directly enable business monetization while mentoring teams and contributing to open-source communities. His track record of eliminating downtime and building scalable infrastructure for platforms serving millions of users positions him as an ideal technical leader for organizations requiring senior DevOps expertise that transforms infrastructure challenges into competitive advantages across cloud-native and bare-metal environments.
In late 2024, he founded his own DevOps outsourcing company, successfully recruiting team members based on trust in his technical vision. His measurable business impact includes creating infrastructure enabling clients to begin commercial operations with AI solutions, redesigning architecture so deployment failures affect only individual microservices rather than all services simultaneously, and consistently reducing deployment times by 80-90%.
Vladimir holds a Bachelor's degree in Law from IGUMO & IT Moscow with professional English proficiency and native Russian fluency. His technical expertise spans Terraform/Terragrunt, Ansible, Kubernetes, GKE, NGINX Ingress, Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, HashiCorp Vault, OpenStack, GitLab CI, Docker, Google Cloud, and AWS.
What distinguishes Vladimir is his ability to operate as sole DevOps specialist in high-growth companies, delivering systems that directly enable business monetization while mentoring teams and contributing to open-source communities. His track record of eliminating downtime and building scalable infrastructure for platforms serving millions of users positions him as an ideal technical leader for organizations requiring senior DevOps expertise that transforms infrastructure challenges into competitive advantages across cloud-native and bare-metal environments.