Benjamin
Gandon

+33 6 12 22 47 38

linkedin.com/in/benjamingandon
gandon.org/benjamin

Paris Area

[ PDF version ]

SENIOR SITE RELIABILITY ENGINEER

Looking for new challenges in Cloud platform engineering and Site Reliability Engineering, incl. team management, public speaking, and tech advocacy.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Site Reliability Engineer for Kubernetes, virtualization, GCE & GKE
S3NS – 2024-2025

As a Platform Engineer, maintained, extended and operated two in-house platforms: one for a Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) virtualization and on top of it, a second platform for Kubernetes-as-a-Service (KaaS) managed clusters, both including many add-ons and tunings. Documented operational processes for these platforms.

Performed Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) on Google-Cloud specific technologies: Google Compute Engine (GCE) and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) especially. Managed alerts and maintenance tasks, in collaboration with Google engineers. Wrote extensive documentation and procedures for improving the productivity of on-callers.

Developed a Kubernetes operator (using Kube Builder and Go) for business requirements with propagating roots of trust. Maintained backup infrastructure (using Velero). Worked on improving collected metrics (using Prometheus operator), logs (Fluent Bit and Loki), monitoring dashboards (in Grafana) and alerts (in Grafana with Mimir datasource).

Worked with ClusterAPI and Kubeadm for KaaS, KubeVirt virtualisation for IaaS, on top of an on-premise bare-metal infrastructure. KubeOVN and Cilium were used as networking technology, and NetApp (via Trident) block storage.

Customer Cloud-Native Success & Kubernetes Trainings Manager
ENIX – 2024

Managed the training business at Enix (related to Docker & Kubernetes), covering course programs, sales, tooling, administrative process, and delegation to external trainers.

Performed project management for delivering Cloud-Native infrastructure installations to clients.

Independent consultancy
GSTACK.IO – 2015-2025

Developed a consultancy business in the area of Platform Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps practice. Focused on Cloud platforms and Cloud automation, starting with Docker, Cloud Foundry, Bosh and Concourse, then transitioning to Kubernetes, GitLab, ArgoCD, and the Kubernetes ecosystem.

SRE @ Michelin. Deployed, maintained and developed the 50+ Kubernetes clusters, managed by a mix of Tanzu, Ansible & ArgoCD automation.

Platform Engineer @ Travelers  (insurance, USA). Joined a team effort to build multiple, complete Cloud Foundry platforms on AWS, with the Bosh robot and Concourse CI/CD automation, implementing promotion between environments, and leveraging open source software exclusively.

SRE @ SAP (Cloud, Germany). Core developer in the OSS Bosh (a.k.a. Borg++) team. Maintained the component that deploys the Bosh robot, that manages the large amount of VMs for the gigantic Business Technology Platform (BTP) at SAP, with 4500+ VMs total in 30 locations, and overall 430TB RAM.

Platform Engineer @ Thales. Documented in depth the Pivotal Cloud Foundry platform running on top of AzureStack private Cloud, for data security certification purposes. Developed and maintained the Cloud Foundry platforms with Bosh and Concourse CI/CD automation, running on top of Azure Cloud.

SRE @ Renault. Developed and maintained the 10+ Pivotal Cloud Foundry platforms (used by connected cars from the Renault-Nissan Alliance) with the Bosh robot and Concourse CI/CD automation. Agile culture and pairing practices, state-of-the-art Continuous Delivery of infrastructure-as-code, GitOps Cloud platforms with gating tests and promotion.

DevOps Coach @ Orange.  Coached a team of database experts in packaging cluster deployments for Cassandra, MongoDB and MariaDB database engines, as “Releases” for the Bosh robot. Assisted the adoptions of CI/CD & software craftsmanship culture, BOSH release design and implementation.

SRE @ Orange. Helped in building an open source Cloud Foundry platform. Automated platform tests and deployments with Concourse CI/CD. Maintained the CloudStack stemcell and contributed an affinity groups feature to the CloudStack CPI, which was a Java codebase.

DevOps @ Carrefour. Built a “software fabric” platform (Jenkins, Jira, Artifactory, SonarCube) “as-a-service” with Docker Compose and Docker Swarm, later Kubernetes on top of an OpenStack private cloud.

Trainer. Built original training materials, exercises and training platforms for various techs: •  Kubernetes starting 2022, delivered multiple times • Concourse starting 2021, delivered to Criteo • Cloud Foundry starting 2021, delivered to ATOS for Air France • Bosh (i.e. Borg++) starting 2017, delivered to Orange multiple times.

Speaker.  Spoke at several conferences and meetups in France and USA.

Chief Technical Officer
ALVARUM.COM – 2012-2015

Transitioned the IT team to a Scrum flow, leveraging multi-skilled DevOps culture, and established Product Management. Established early rough estimates, improving features prioritisation into a downsized, lean roadmap.

Developed the Agile and Software Craftsmanship culture. Reduced cycles from 6 to 3 weeks. Reached milestones in improved team collaboration, autonomy, and flexibility.

Heavily refactored a monolithic legacy Java Spring software, factoring out 4 new Groovy Grails microservices, connected with REST APIs and Mule ESB data pipelines. Introduced AngularJS as frontend tech, and new mobile-first web designs.

Established the 24/7 on-call duties, teaching early SRE practice to engineers, relentlessly eliminating false-positives from the Nagios supervision.

Bootstrapped an IT services offer for higher income, winning new business through workshops, formalising customer business requirements.

Java Architect & Project Manager
LINKEO – 2008-2012

Developed new web platforms for Click-to-Call and Click-to-Chat services, with Java Spring backends and AJAX web frontends. Large number of diverse technologies, related to Java, web and telephony.

Senior Consultant
PROVADYS – 2007

Evaluated Information Security risks in clients organisations. Provided recommendations for improving internal control. High quality standards in deliverables, self organisation and communication to clients.

Information Systems Auditor
SOCIETE GENERALE – 2005-2006

Drove internal audit engagements to assess risks in IT organisations , like African retail banking and leasing companies in Europe. Conforming high quality standards in methodologies and deliverables.

IT Security Expert
SOCIETE GENERALE – 2003-2004

Deployed vulnerability scans to assess security risks of public web servers, from all subsidiaries of the Société Générale Group. Developed and published a dashboard for monthly reviews of exposure levels, and provided to operational teams guidance in identifying how to fix vulnerabilities.

R&D Engineer
SOCIETE GENERALE – 2001-2002

Developed a vulnerability scanner, with modular CORBA architecture, a C++ framework for IP frames analysis, and rendering modules for graphical results written in Perl and PHP/PostgreSQL.

EDUCATION

MINES ParisTech

Master, Computer Science, Maths, Engineering Management  – 2000-2002

Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Nancy

Master, Computer Science and Control Theory  – 1998-2001

FOREIGN LANGUAGES

Native French    |    Fluent in English    |    Good level in German    |    Chinese notions

REFERENCES

Available on request.