Paul Baker Sladek

Director, AI Platform & DevOps

I’m Director, AI Platform and DevOps at Seekr, where I help build platforms that scale, pipelines that behave, and systems that mostly don’t page anyone at 3 a.m.

I’m motivated by practical problem-solving, teams that think before they build (and debug before they panic), and the daily challenge of making complexity feel simple.

Outside of work, I hike with my dog Charlie (he sets the pace), ride motorcycles (mostly forward), and play chess (badly, but with conviction).

Thanks for taking an interest.

Cheers,

pbsladek

I'm not looking for work right now.

Experience

Seekr Technologies Inc.

Director, AI Platform & DevOps • Aug, 2025 — Present

Seekr Technologies Inc.

Manager, DevOps • Aug, 2023 — Aug, 2025

  • Scale the team from 1 to 6
  • Manage 6 senior engineers (1 Platform, 1 SRE, 4 DevOps) while being an individual contributor
  • Drive priorities, roadmap decisions, and on time deliverables
  • Assist with development and design of SeekrFlow - an AI platform for training, inferencing, and alignment of LLMs
  • Drive development of core product helm charts
  • Utilize ArgoCD to handle all deployments for all Kubernetes clusters
  • Operate and maintain 4 managed Kubernetes clusters on Intel Developer Cloud (200+ nodes, Gaudi2 HPU)
  • Upgrade multiple on-prem OpenSeach clusters from 1.3 to 2.12
  • Assist with running Rook/Ceph for our Kubernetes storage solution (dynamic volume provisioning)
  • Assist with migrating all persistence to managed Weka Storage
  • Maintain multiple Postgres and OpenSearch StatefulSets
  • Maintain a Grafana stack per Kubernetes cluster (Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, Alertmanger, Promtail)
  • Assist with Habana version upgrades (firmware, node rotations, k8s device plugins)
  • Assist with Kubernetes on-prem upgrades to 1.24
  • Integrate Kaniko into our build pipelines
  • Install and manage Istio for our Ingress Controller
  • Scale and tune our inferencing deployments
  • Scale and tune our authentication service
  • Implement connection pooling for the authentication service
  • Troubleshoot issues with scaling foundation model training
  • Implement on-call rotation with PagerDuty

Seekr Technologies Inc.

Sr. DevOps Engineer • Oct, 2022 — Aug 2023

  • Provide support 24/7 for several production applications
  • Drive infrastructure roadmap planning and implementation
  • Consolidate on-prem Nexus servers into 2 from 6 and migrate everything over
  • Upgrade Nexus to latest version (v3.42)
  • Upgrade InfluxDB, Telegraf, Prometheus, Grafana
  • Configure CloudFront for Seekr.com and Missionseekr.com
  • Configure GPU mig settings for new Kubernetes nodes
  • Add and remove Kubernetes nodes on development,staging, and production clusters (v1.20.7)
  • Utilize EKS to uncover on-prem bottle necks and performance test gpus
  • Configure Kubernetes sealed secrets and integrate into applications
  • Troubleshoot a variety of Kubernetes issues (GlusterFS, CoreDNS, Pod Deployments)
  • Utilize Terragrunt to standup Seekr.com on AWS
  • Migrate from Github to on-prem self hosted Gitlab
  • Assist with final transition off TeamCity to Gitlab
  • Migrate Seekr.com to on-prem Kubernetes
  • Create Missionseekr.com infra on Kubernetes
  • Upgrade and scale ELK stack from 1 node to 3 node cluster (v6.8.3)
  • Configure multiple Elasticsearch clusters on-prem (v6.8.3)
  • Configure multiple Amazon OpenSearch clusters on-prem (v2.6)
  • Configure and maintain MongoDB (v6.0.2)
  • Configure and maintain multiple Aerospike clusters (v3.15.5, v4.5.5)
  • Assist in the transition from Elasticseach to Amazon OpenSearch
  • Scale and automate the ability to provision bare-metals and VMs via Foreman
  • Assist with migrating from legacy BIOS to EFI boot with Foreman
  • Configure F5 to manage blue/green deployments
  • Migrate F5 configuration to be managed by Terraform
  • Migrate all AWS configuration to be managed by Terraform
  • Upgrade all Terraform code (v1.1.5)
  • Build out CI/CD pipelines for multiple applications and infrastructure (Java, C#, Node)
  • Manage and improve gradle plugin build wrapper (centralized deployment library)
  • Plan, configure, and maintain multi node Dgraph cluster (distributed graph database)
  • Write and maintain a variety of Puppet modules (v6.28)

WarnerMedia

Lead DevOps Engineer • Mar, 2021 — Oct 2022

  • DevOps lead for a team of 3
  • Help drive infrastructure roadmap planning and implementation
  • Provide support 24/7 for 7 production applications
  • Work closely with developers to design and build new application features

WarnerMedia

DevOps Engineer • Mar, 2019 — Mar, 2021 (2 years)

  • DevOps lead for a team of 3
  • Help drive infrastructure roadmap planning and implementation
  • Collection migration from Mongo Atlas to AWS DocumentDB for independent scaling of heavy write collection with no downtime
  • Migrate self hosted MongoDB on EC2 to Mongo Atlas for 8 applications
  • Elasticsearch version upgrades and encryption, migration to new clusters with minimal downtime
  • Dockerize multiple older EC2 based deployments
  • Build out self hosted Github runners for cost savings and more control
  • Develop node based CloudFormation deployment tool to standardize deployment model across projects (simple-cfn)
  • Design, build, and maintain Jenkins cluster on AWS ECS
  • Migrate all existing Jenkins builds and Jenkins clusters into ECS version
  • Centralize IAM to single account to ease management and utilize a cross account access model
  • Centralize operations infrastructure to cross account model (ex: single jenkins with cross account deployments, single nexus)
  • Design, build, and maintain internal DAM product infrastructure
  • Build out deploy pipelines for Java, Node, PHP and dockerized applications
  • Migrate existing operations tooling into operations only AWS account
  • Design, implement, and fix application networking
  • Integrate AWS Direct Connect into multiple vpc where required
  • Maintain and write Ansible playbooks
  • Maintain and write CloudFormation templates
  • Maintain and write Terraform modules
  • Maintain and write Python, Node and Bash scripts for daily tasks
  • Provide support 24/7 for 7 production applications
  • Integrate OKTA for multiple public applications
  • Build out automated security remediation (ex: base containers/ami with security agents, automated IAM key rotation)
  • Remediate security issues, culminating in the remediation of 50k+ security fixes over 6 months
  • Work closely with developers to design and build new application features

Bynder | Webdam

DevOps Engineer • Aug, 2018 — Mar, 2019 (8 months)

  • Lead PHP 7.2 upgrade team
  • Migrated infrastructure into multiple AWS regions
  • Maintain and write Chef recipes
  • Maintain and write CloudFormation templates
  • Maintain and write Python and Bash scripts for daily tasks
  • Automate SSL renewal and installation with CloudFront
  • Debug and fix production outages with minimal downtime
  • Work closely with developers to design and build new features

Webdam, a Shutterstock Company

Software Engineer • Aug, 2013 — Aug, 2018 (5 years)

  • Migrated search platform from Sphinx to Apache Solr
  • Maintain, scale, and develop features for our search API (100+ million documents)
  • Built and maintain audit logging service
  • Migrated audit logging service backend from Mongo to Redshift
  • Rebuilt image processing server
  • Scale and maintain image processing architecture
  • Migrated public CDN to a secure CDN
  • Reimplement and architect features for performance gains
  • Assisted with PHP 5.3 to PHP 5.6 upgrade
  • Assisted with full infrastructure migration into AWS
  • Assisted with SVN to Git migration

San Francisco State University

Lecturer • Jan, 2017 — July, 2017 (1 semester)

  • Provide informative presentations to students regarding the intro to Java programming curriculum
  • Plan the content to be covered in the class according to the curriculum
  • Responsible for ensuring that all students fully comprehended the curriculum
  • Provide creative learning exercises to keep students engaged
  • Provided support to students who required extra guidance
  • Host weekly office hours and provide availability upon request in person and remotely

Skills

Languages

PHP, Python, Ruby, Javascript, Node, Java, Go, Bash

Tools

Elasticsearch, MySQL, MongoDB, Ansible, Foreman, Kubernetes, Aerospike, Dgraph, Amazon OpenSearch, Puppet, Terraform, Terragrunt, Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, Docker, PagerDuty, Datadog, Pingdom, ImageMagick, ArgoCD, Argo Workflows, Istio, Helm, InfluxDB, Telegraf, F5, Kafka, Postgres, Nexus, Chef, Jenkins, Git, Ubuntu, CentOS, AmazonLinux, JVM, NewRelic, Sumo Logic, Apache Solr, Gitlab, Self-hosted Gitlab, Gitlab Runners, Kubernetes Gitlab Runners, Github Actions, PRTG, LVM, VMware, Logstash, Kibana, Filebeat, Chainguard, Distroless Images, Zoekt, CUDA, ROCm, Nvidia GPU Nodes, AMD GPU Nodes

AWS Services

ECS, ECR, KMS, S3, CloudFront, EC2, VPC, SQS, SNS, ElastiCache, Elastisearch Service, Redshift, EKS, RDS, Route53, Lambda, Kinesis, Transit Gateway, EFS, CloudFormation, Glacier, CloudWatch, IAM, Systems Manager, Certificate Manager

AI & ML

LLM Training, LLM Inferencing, LLM Alignment, AI Platform Engineering, vLLM, Gaudi2 HPU, Nvidia GPU, AMD GPU, CUDA, ROCm, SeekrFlow

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)

OKE, VCN, DRG, KMS, Streaming (Kafka), Identity & Policies

Education

San Francisco State University

Bachelor of Science, Computer Science • 2008 — 2013

Recognition

BMC Software Scholarship

Outstanding Achievement • 2013

The BMC Software scholarship recognizes outstanding academic achievement in Computer Science.

Memberships