Kombo.dev

Kombo is a YC-backed (W22) startup building HR infrastructure to streamline processes and integrations across multiple platforms. I was brought in as the senior technical voice for a 15-engineer team, and in one quarter I scoped and executed a full modernization of the company’s GCP infrastructure.

Key Achievements

• Scoped and delivered a full GCP modernization in one quarter: as the senior technical voice for a 15-engineer team, I owned the decision on what to rebuild and in what order — revamping the entire GCP infrastructure with Terraform and CI/CD pipelines. The result was a ~40% reduction in infrastructure costs in one quarter, delivered with no downtime through enhanced security protocols and performance optimization.
• Chose reliability practice over firefighting: built incident response protocols, runbooks, a root cause analysis practice, and MTTR tracking from scratch — then led the resolution of recurring database reliability incidents, mentoring the team in RCA so the fixes stuck.
• Rebuilt observability as a team standard, not a dashboard: redesigned monitoring across Cloud Run, GKE, Cloud SQL, and Redis, and standardized 4 Golden Signals alerts adopted across 15 engineers, with training materials to make the practice consistent.
• Promoted inclusive engineering practices via knowledge sharing, mentoring, and cross-team collaboration to drive sustainable development.

Technical Focus

• GCP migration and cost optimization (Cloud Run, GKE, Cloud SQL, Redis)
• Infrastructure as Code with Terraform and CI/CD pipelines
• Observability strategy: 4 Golden Signals alerting and monitoring standards
• Incident response, runbooks, RCA practice, and MTTR tracking