Usman Shahid
Classic SRE discipline applied to the agentic-AI era. 11+ years scaling resilient, cost-effective cloud infrastructure, now building production AI Agent platforms with MCP, multi-agent orchestration, and human-in-the-loop approvals.
Impact at a glance
Primer · open-source project
An unopinionated, batteries-included agent-orchestration platform. Instead of one giant agent with everything crammed into its prompt, Primer orchestrates fleets of small, focused agents, each with a clean working context, runnable on your own hardware.
A small model given a clean, purpose-built context can rival a much larger one. A lever on any model, large or small.
Engineering for cost
Cut EKS cluster spend by 40% without compromising reliability, through workload-aware right-sizing and aggressive but safe consolidation.
- Karpenter consolidation, bin-packing nodes for higher utilization.
- ARM (Graviton) and Spot migration for compute-heavy workloads.
- Vertical Pod Autoscaler right-sizing to eliminate over-provisioning.
- Custom scheduling to densely co-locate compatible workloads.
From 12 gateways to 1
At Careem I built a self-service API Gateway platform on Kong, then reliably migrated live public traffic off 12 legacy reverse proxies and gateways onto it, without dropping a request.
Experience
Staff Site Reliability Engineer
Technical Lead and SRE Architect mentoring a team focused on infrastructure provisioning and developer experience.
- Designed and built a self-service AI Agent Platform with MCP tool-calling, multi-agent orchestration, and HITL approval flows, ~200K req/day, ~800 tools, ~60 production agents.
- Slashed EKS cluster costs by 40% via Karpenter consolidation, ARM/Spot migration, VPA, and custom scheduling.
- Consolidated 12 legacy API gateways (~10k RPS) onto a single Kong gateway with 99.99% uptime during cutover.
- Built a fully automated provisioning platform with GitOps (Terraform + Terragrunt), new services from days to minutes.
Senior Site Reliability Engineer
Led migration of 300+ microservices from legacy AWS infrastructure to AWS EKS.
- Engineered automated provisioning of multiple EKS clusters with Terraform + Terragrunt.
- Built the observability stack with Prometheus, Thanos, and Grafana, high-cardinality storage, SLO dashboards, cost tracking.
- Improved deployment safety via Linkerd service mesh with automated canary rollouts through Flagger.
Infrastructure Architect & Team Lead
Designed the infrastructure of a Cloud IIoT Platform while leading a team of 6 polyglot engineers in a KanBan model.
- Built a bespoke Kubernetes Ingress Operator for bare-metal clusters using RedHat operator-sdk.
- Integrated ArgoCD with Keycloak for a secure, auditable GitOps workflow on Helm-based deployments.
- Implemented Google SRE golden signals on bare-metal Kubernetes using Prometheus.
Senior Software / DevOps Engineer
Containerized a distributed Industrial IoT platform and built core delivery infrastructure.
- Built a serverless framework in Python running code on containers via Kubernetes / Marathon / Metronome.
- Built an OPC → MQTT data pipeline in C# using Avro RPC and REST, plus a StatsD metric aggregator in Go.
- Built an OpenID Connect Identity Provider with Spring OAuth2 across AD, LDAP, JDBC, and Mongo backends.
Software Developer · NCache & NosDB
Core developer for NCache Enterprise (distributed cache for .NET) and NosDB Enterprise (NoSQL JSON store).
- Reimplemented Microsoft's Collections to prevent Large Object Heap (LOH) leakage.
- Built file-storage-based B+ Tree indexing with single-attribute and compound index support.
- Built the query execution system using Streams and nested Enumerables in C#.