Sergio Talens-Oliag

Profile

Senior DevOps and Platform Engineer with over 30 years of experience in designing, operating and automating cloud and on-premises infrastructures. Strong background in systems administration, platform engineering, security and automation. Contributor to the Debian project and author of technical articles and conference talks. Experienced in teams management.

Contact

Education

  • Degree in Computer Science — Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (UPV)

  • A.B.D., Distributed and Parallel Computation (DSIC, UPV)

  • Advanced Studies Diploma (D.E.A.), Interdisciplinary Doctorate in Communication (Universidad de Valencia, UV)

Core competencies

  • Cloud: AWS, GCP

  • Containers & Orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes (EKS, GKE)

  • IaC & GitOps: Terraform, Helm, Helmfile

  • IaaS: OpenStack, Proxmox

  • CI/CD: GitLab CI, GitHub Actions

  • Observability: Prometheus, Grafana

  • Security & Secrets: Vault, cert-manager

  • Databases & Messaging: PostgreSQL, Cassandra, Kafka, Redis

  • Languages & Automation: Python, Bourne shell, Go, Java, Node.js

  • Tools: Ansible, Git, Docker, KVM, CEPH

Professional experience

VASS — Senior DevOps Engineer (Jun 2024 – present)

https://vasscompany.com/

  • Collaborate on design and operation of development and production infrastructures in AWS and GCP.

  • Implement infrastructure as code (Terraform) and packaging (Helmfile); automate platform provisioning and deployments.

  • Evaluate, configure and deploy Kubernetes platform components (cert-manager, EKS, GKE, external-dns) and observability/security tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, Vault).

  • Support application teams with CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI, GitHub Actions) and automation code.

Intelygenz / VASS — Senior DevOps Engineer (Mar 2023 – Jun 2024)

https://intelygenz.com/

  • Worked on Zenith, a banking PaaS: platform components, CI/CD workflows and deployment and operations guides.

  • Contributed to infrastructure automation, Kubernetes platform hardening and deployment stability improvements.

Kyso Operations Europe Limited — Senior DevOps Engineer (Jan 2022 – Sep 2023)

https://kyso.io/

  • Built the self-hosted enterprise distribution of Kyso for customers (container images, packaging, marketplace artifacts).

  • Wrote deployment and operations guides; supported customer on-boarding and upgrades.

  • Implemented CI/CD practices and security-conscious image builds.

Curelator Inc. — Consultant, Backend Development Team (Aug 2021 – Jan 2022)

https://n1-headache.com/

  • Implemented backend features, participated in code reviews and release activities as a Python developer.

Agile Content S.A. — IT Senior Operations Architect (Jan 2020 – Jul 2021)

https://www.agilecontent.com/

  • Set up CI/CD and deployment infrastructure for the AgileTV platform using GitLab, Docker and Kubernetes.

  • Developed deployment tooling and managed platform services (nginx, HAProxy, PostgreSQL, Prometheus, ELK).

Instituto Tecnológico de Informática (ITI), Universidad Politécnica de Valencia

https://www.iti.es/

  • Director, Information Systems Department (Mar 2006 – Jan 2020):

    • Managed systems administration and application teams; responsible for IaaS (OpenStack, Proxmox), container orchestration (Kubernetes), and core services (DNS, LDAP, mail, backups).

    • Led development and integration of internal applications (Project Execution Manager, Web Identity Manager) and GitLab/Gitea hook processing (Golang).

  • Director, Free Software, Systems and Security Area — FS³A (May 2010 – Dec 2014)

  • Information Systems Manager (Mar 2006 – Apr 2010)

Academic and earlier professional roles

  • Part-time lecturer, Departamento de Informática, Universidad de València (multiple periods: 2004–2019): Security, Computer Networks, Databases, Operating Systems labs.

  • Computer Science Analyst, T-Systems S.A. (Jan 2004 – Mar 2006): LliureX distribution integration and packaging.

  • Computer Security Consultant, Tissat S.A. (Dec 2002 – Dec 2003)

  • Senior Programmer roles at iBC and iSOCO (2000–2002)

  • Researcher, ITI (1998–2000)

  • Freelance system administrator (1995–1998)

Selected projects

  • Zenith — PaaS for Banking environments (platform automation, CI/CD)

  • GitLab/Gitea hook processing system (Golang): https://salsa.debian.org/sto/json2file-go

  • Multi-application LDAP synchronization tooling (Python + Ansible)

  • Web Identity Service (Python; HTTP Basic Auth and JWT integration)

  • LliureX — contributions to custom GNU/Linux distribution for public administration

Talks & publications

  • Author of technical articles on systems administration, security and free software. Examples and links available on personal homepage.

  • Conference talks and lectures (Conferencia Internacional de Software Libre, Jornades de Programari Lliure at the UPC, academic seminars).

  • Book: INTERNET. Redes de Computadores y Sistemas de Información (ITP-Paraninfo, 1997).

Courses taught

  • Introduction to Docker & Kubernetes — UPV administration (2019–2020)

  • DevOps with GitLab, Docker and Kubernetes — ITI (2019)

  • Advanced/Basic Linux for Administrators — ITI (2016)

  • LPIC-1 preparation courses (2010, 2011, 2015, 2016)

Languages

  • Spanish — native

  • English — C2 (Certificate of Proficiency, Cambridge, Jun 2023)

  • Catalan / Valencian — high (written & spoken)

  • German — basic (A2, Official Languages School)

Other activities