Riwaj Chipalu / DevOps

Available for DevOps / Platform roles

Riwaj Chipalu
DevOps Engineer

I make deployments boring in the best way. My work lives between "it works on my machine" and "it survived Friday at 6pm": GitOps where every change traces to a commit, pipelines developers actually trust, and alerts that mean something. Currently keeping production calm at Rumsan.

View selected work riwazu23@gmail.com
Location
Kathmandu, Nepal
Certification
AWS Solutions Architect Associate
Currently
DevOps Engineer, Rumsan
Kubernetes Terraform AWS Argo CD GitHub Actions Prometheus Docker Linux

01. Selected work

Projects with production impact

Four builds that show how I think: reusable, secure, observable, and automated.

01

CI/CD · Security

Reusable, secure CI/CD pipeline framework

Composite actions, workflow inputs, and matrix builds for parallel testing across Node versions. Vault injects secrets at runtime, so no credentials are hardcoded. Trivy + SonarQube gate every merge; ephemeral preview environments spin up per PR and tear down on merge.

  • GitHub Actions
  • Vault
  • Trivy
  • SonarQube

02

IaC · AWS

Terraform module architecture for AWS

Reusable modules with configurable inputs, output chaining, and remote state on S3 with DynamoDB locking. Infra CI runs plan on PR and apply on merge, which keeps provisioning fast and environments free of config drift.

  • Terraform
  • AWS
  • S3
  • DynamoDB

03

Containers · Hardening

Distroless image optimization

Rebuilt frontend images on distroless bases: smaller pull size, smaller attack surface, faster build and deploy times, and a stronger supply-chain posture verified by Trivy scans.

  • Docker
  • Distroless
  • Trivy

04

GitOps · Observability

GitOps delivery with Argo CD + Helm

Declarative Kubernetes delivery with Argo CD and Helm, plus Prometheus + Grafana monitoring and alerting for cluster health. Every deployment traces back to a commit.

  • Argo CD
  • Helm
  • Kubernetes
  • Grafana

02. Experience

Where I've worked

  1. DevOps Engineer at Rumsan

    Full-time · Kathmandu

    • Own Kubernetes across AKS, EKS, and on-prem; standardized Argo CD GitOps, Server-Side Apply, and Helm subchart conventions.
    • Designed the Prometheus + Grafana stack for centralized metrics and infra health monitoring.
    • Built GitHub Actions pipelines for monorepos and microservices, cutting deployment time by 50% with Trivy scanning, Cosign signing, and SBOM generation.
    • Run production infra on AWS and DigitalOcean across concurrent projects; deploy and observe Chatty, an AI assistant on the Rahat platform.

  2. System Engineer at DataHub Nepal

    Full-time · Kathmandu

    • Provisioned VMs and VPCs on private cloud; automated provisioning with Terraform.
    • Linux administration: LVM storage, filesystems, system troubleshooting.
    • Migration and backup with Veeam and vSphere snapshots; evaluated KubeVirt for Kubernetes-native virtualization.

  3. IT Support Intern at Technoplanet Nepal

    Internship · Kathmandu

    • System-wide upgrades and patching; L1/L2 support across OS, apps, and networking.
    • Wrote technical docs and user guides that streamlined support operations.

03. Skills

Toolbox

Grouped by what I reach for in production, not a keyword cloud.

Orchestration

Docker, Compose, Swarm, Kubernetes, Argo CD, Helm, KubeVirt

CI/CD & Automation

GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Vault, matrix builds, preview environments

Infrastructure as Code

Terraform, CloudFormation, S3 + DynamoDB state locking

Observability

Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Zabbix, Slack alerting

Security

Trivy, SonarQube, OWASP checks, Checkov, Cosign, SBOM, distroless

Platform

AWS, Azure, DigitalOcean, Linux, Bash, Python, TCP/IP · DNS

04. About

Good infrastructure is invisible.

I got into this field answering support tickets, which is probably why I obsess over the things users never see: backups that actually restore, alerts that fire before customers notice, pipelines that fail loudly instead of silently passing. Boring, reliable systems are the goal.

These days I'm a DevOps engineer at Rumsan, working on platforms with real social stakes like Rahat. My bias is toward automation with a paper trail, security that doesn't slow developers down, and documenting things so the next person isn't guessing at 2am.

05. Contact

Let's build reliable infrastructure.

Open to DevOps, Platform, and SRE roles, and always up for talking shop about Kubernetes, Terraform, or observability.

Email me