I build the infrastructure that lets startups ship fast without breaking trust.

Most seed-to-Series A companies hit the same wall: they've moved fast, won customers, raised money — and now those enterprise buyers are asking for SOC2 Type II, HIPAA evidence, PCI-DSS controls, or a Kubernetes architecture that doesn't collapse under load.

That's where I come in.

I'm a Senior Platform Engineer and FinOps specialist who sits at the intersection of three disciplines that most engineers treat as separate jobs: cloud infrastructure, security compliance, and cloud cost engineering. My thesis is simple — infrastructure built for speed is not built for trust, and you can't bolt trust on after the fact.

I work with EU and US companies at the seed-to-Series A inflection point through my consultancy Cloudfrugal, and I'm selectively available for founding engineer engagements where the infrastructure layer is a strategic bet, not an afterthought.

github.com/aayostem/financial-rag-agent

A production-grade multi-agent financial intelligence system built end-to-end — from SEC EDGAR ingestion to LLM-powered Q&A — across 14 architectural layers with 106 passing tests.

What makes it production-grade, not a demo:

The full 7-phase Kubernetes production deployment spans 6 Terragrunt modules across 3 environments. The staging cluster (financial-rag-staging-cluster, us-east-1) reached Helm revision 7 with the complete LGTM observability stack, Falco runtime security, and OPA/Gatekeeper policy enforcement.

Companion projects in the same mono-repo infrastructure:

• Drift Sentinel — ML model drift detection with automated alerting pipelines
• RiskOracle — Quantitative risk analytics for financial institutions

All three share a Transit Gateway-compatible CIDR allocation strategy for future inter-VPC routing.

Platform Engineering    EKS · Karpenter · Cilium · Istio · ArgoCD · Helm · Terragrunt/Terraform
Security & Compliance   SOC2 Type II · HIPAA · PCI-DSS · HCP Vault · Falco · OPA/Gatekeeper
FinOps                  Cloud cost attribution · Kubernetes cost-per-workload · Spot/on-demand strategy
Observability           Prometheus · Grafana · Loki · Tempo (LGTM stack) · OpenTelemetry
Post-Quantum Crypto     ML-DSA-65 (FIPS 204) · ML-KEM-768 (FIPS 203) · Hybrid ECDSA/X25519
Data                    PostgreSQL + pgvector · Redis · Alembic · SEC EDGAR ingestion pipelines
Languages               Python · Bash · HCL · YAML · SQL

Alva (post-quantum transaction identity) — Designed the full hybrid PQC architecture for a transaction identity startup building on ML-DSA-65 (FIPS 204) + ECDSA for signatures and ML-KEM-768 (FIPS 203) + X25519 for key encapsulation. Produced the 8-week MVP scope, infra cost model (~$224–384/mo), and the founding engineer engagement structure.

LexClaro — Identified three critical compliance gaps (PII scrubbing for GDPR Art.25, customer-managed KMS, document-level audit trail) after reviewing their AWS architecture. Proposed a targeted Gap Sprint to remediate before enterprise client onboarding.

For sub-10 companies (pre-product-market-fit, pre-SOC2):

• On-Call CTO · Pre-Launch Audit · Gap Sprint · First Hire Infrastructure Review

For 10+ companies (post-Series A, scaling platform):

• FinOps Principal · Platform Engineering Lead · SOC2 Type II Program Lead · Fractional CTO

Geography: Lagos, Nigeria — serving EU and US clients via Deel / Payoneer / Remote.com

I write about the intersection of platform engineering, SOC2, and FinOps as one unified discipline — not three separate jobs.

• dev.to/aayostem — Long-form technical breakdowns
• hashnode/aayostem — technical breakdowns
• Medium/@aayostem — Architecture patterns for seed-to-Series A infra

Five-course portfolio in development:

1. Financial RAG Agent (26h) — Production ML system on EKS
2. SOC2 Type II Engineering (20h) — Evidence pipelines, not paperwork
3. FinOps + IDP Engineering (20h) — Cost attribution at Kubernetes granularity
4. ML Drift Detection: Drift Sentinel (16h)
5. Enterprise ML Risk: RiskOracle (18h)

Consulting: Cloudfrugal Email: aayo.software@gmail.com Available for: Founding engineer roles · Fractional CTO · SOC2 retainers · FinOps audits

If your infrastructure can't pass a vendor security questionnaire, you're leaving enterprise revenue on the table. Let's fix that.