Engineering Infrastructure
at Scale.
I'm Yasser. I build the cloud, ML and reliability layer behind products that suddenly need to handle real traffic. Head of Infrastructure at Barakah; previously ran the platform behind 400M+ daily requests for 70K merchants at Salla.
How I Think About Infrastructure
Every system I touch gets evaluated through four lenses: scale, security, cost, and business impact.

The Path Here
I started at Puritec — containerizing apps, wiring up CI/CD, and managing infrastructure across AWS and Oracle Cloud for clients in consulting, staffing, and food-tech. Five years of that taught me how to build things that work across very different business contexts.
Then I joined Salla and the scale changed completely. I helped architect the EKS platform — multi-cluster Kubernetes with Istio, ArgoCD, and Karpenter — that serves hundreds of millions of requests daily. I also led Terraform adoption across five infrastructure domains: compute, storage, data, cybersecurity, and AI/ML.
Before leaving, I built Salla's MLOps platform — product categorization using vision and embedding models, inference pipelines on SageMaker, vector search with Pinecone. I learned GenAI alongside an ex-META mentor, which has been one of the best decisions I've made.
Right now, I'm leading infrastructure at Barakah, where I've been building since 2022. Kubernetes, Kafka, and infrastructure-as-code underneath; end-to-end observability from the app to the backend; GitOps with Argo CD; and a security and PCI DSS program on top — for a marketplace serving 2M+ users across 7 Saudi cities.
How I Work
Infrastructure should pay for itself
I think about cloud spend the way a CFO thinks about budgets. Every resource justifies its cost or gets cut.
Security isn't a phase
It's in the pipeline from day one. Scanned, signed, policy-checked — before anything hits production.
Build for the next 10x
Today's architecture should handle tomorrow's traffic without a redesign. I've been through enough scaling emergencies to plan ahead.
Ship things that matter
I don't build infrastructure for the sake of it. Every system I work on ties back to a business outcome — revenue, reliability, or speed.
Want to talk infrastructure?
I'm always up for a good conversation about scaling challenges, MLOps, or cloud architecture.
Where I've Built Things
From multi-cloud consulting to platform engineering at Middle East e-commerce scale — and now leading infrastructure at Barakah.
Head of Infrastructure
Own the cloud, data, and reliability platform behind Barakah — Saudi Arabia's surplus-food marketplace connecting restaurants, bakeries, and groceries with customers.
Key Achievements
- Built the cloud and data platform from the ground up — Kubernetes, service mesh, and Kafka event streaming, fully defined as infrastructure-as-code — behind a marketplace serving 2M+ users and 4K+ F&B partners across 7 Saudi cities
- Run GitOps delivery with Argo CD across production and dev Kubernetes clusters, hardening workloads with disruption budgets, autoscaling floors, and redesigned health probes
- Shipped end-to-end observability — distributed traces and metrics from the mobile app through the gateway to backend services, on a self-hosted telemetry stack — backing a 99% availability SLO
- Lead security and compliance: turned an external penetration test into a prioritized remediation plan, mapped 86 PCI DSS v4.0.1 infrastructure controls to evidence, and centralized secrets management with isolated per-environment access
- Head the infrastructure and Data & AI teams, and introduced FinOps (cloud cost visibility, CI and third-party API spend guardrails) plus a blameless postmortem practice
Technologies
Senior Cloud Engineer — MLOps Focus
Owned the compute platform and MLOps infrastructure for Salla's e-commerce ecosystem.
Key Achievements
- Architected the EKS compute platform with Istio, ArgoCD, and Karpenter — serving the platform's full API traffic across distributed microservices
- Built product categorization pipeline using Qwen3 vision and embedding models with Pinecone vector database, enabling automated classification for 70K merchant catalogs
- Led Terraform automation across 5 domains — computing, storage, data, cybersecurity, and AI/ML — governing the SDLC for all platform developers
- Designed Karpenter spot-instance strategy that cut EC2 spend by 20% without reliability tradeoffs
- Built SageMaker inference pipelines and multi-agent systems for production ML workloads
Technologies
Senior DevOps Engineer
Led the DevOps function across AWS and Oracle Cloud, managing 5 production applications on Kubernetes for clients in consulting, staffing, and food industries.
Key Achievements
- Deployed 5 production applications on Kubernetes with automated CI/CD pipelines via GitLab, standardizing deployment strategies across all projects
- Managed multi-cloud infrastructure across AWS and Oracle Cloud, serving clients in management consulting, on-demand staffing, and food industry
- Mentored junior engineers, wrote operational runbooks — on-call incidents dropped 30%
- Expanded Amazon Partner Network (APN) relationship, unlocking co-sell opportunities and cloud credits worth $20K+
Technologies
Interested?
If you're dealing with scaling challenges, cloud cost problems, or need someone to build your ML infrastructure — let's talk.
What I've Shipped
Numbers from systems I've built and operate in production — not benchmarks, not demos.
Where I Go Deep
Three areas where I have real production battle scars.
Platform Engineering
I build platforms that other engineers build on. Not just "keep the lights on" infrastructure — actual developer platforms with self-service deployments, observability built in, and autoscaling that doesn't need babysitting at 3 AM.
MLOps & AI Infrastructure
Taking ML from notebook to production is a different game. I build the inference pipelines, model serving infrastructure, and vector search systems that make AI actually work at scale — not just in a demo.
DevSecFinOps
Security and cost aren't afterthoughts — they're architectural constraints I design around. Every PR gets scanned, every resource gets a cost tag, every deployment decision has a business justification.
If your infrastructure is the bottleneck — I can help fix that.
Let's TalkCertifications
AWS Solutions Architect — Associate
Cloud architecture design and AWS best practices
Let's Talk
Have an infrastructure problem? Building an ML platform? Just want to nerd out about Kubernetes? I'm here.
Reach Out
I like solving hard problems — especially when they involve scale, cost, or making AI work in production. Drop me a message with what you're working on and I'll come prepared with ideas, not a sales deck.
GitHub
github.com/yalattasSelective consulting slots open — response within 24 hours.
Send a Message
Tell me what you're building and what's not working. I'll get back to you within a few days.
Prefer a call?
Sometimes it's easier to just talk. Book a time and we'll figure out if I can help.