Ali Kahoot — CTO

I design and scale resilient, secure, and automated infrastructure to keep high-performing applications running at their best. With 9+ years of experience including 4.5 years in leadership, I’ve built and led teams delivering complex production grade deployments on Kubernetes, OpenShift, and cloud platforms across multiple industries. Currently, I am working remotely as the Head of Infrastructure at pawaPay, a fintech powering mobile money across Africa, handling 4M+ daily transactions across hundreds of microservices. We have managed to get 2 billion transactions through our platform, with 100% uptime over the last 10 months. Previously, I have worked at Tarabut Gateway, pioneering in Open Banking in MENA region as the first in-house DevOps hire and built the entire DevOps flow, onboarded 10 banks and able to hit 99.99% uptime. I also led the team at Stakater, a Swedish company offering managed Kubernetes/OpenShift and DevOps as a Service solutions. During my tenure, I was responsible for the architecture and significantly grew the team by 300%.. Beyond work, I’m passionate about teaching and community. I have - Trained 800+ professionals worldwide in Kubernetes & DevOps - Taught DevOps for the graduating batch of BS(CS) at FAST-NUCES - Speaker at DevOpsCon Singapore, Data on Kubernetes, and Kubernetes Community Days. - Contributed towards 10+ open-source projects, including Reloader (9k+ GitHub stars) - Blog on Kubernetes with 200k+ Medium reads Certifications: CKA, CKAD, AWS SA Associate, OCI Architect, RedHat OpenShift Skillset: Kubernetes, OpenShift, Helm, AWS, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, ArgoCD/Flux, Terraform, Ansible, AWS/Azure/GCP/OCI, and more.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a Fintech Infrastructure Expert with extensive experience in Kubernetes and DevOps.

Experience: 10 yrs 2 mos

Skills

Kubernetes
Infrastructure Management
Continuous Delivery (cd)
Devops

Career Highlights

Led infrastructure team achieving 100% uptime.
Trained over 800 professionals in Kubernetes and DevOps.
Pioneered DevOps practices in the MENA region.

Work Experience

pawaPay

Infrastructure Team Lead (2 yrs 5 mos)

Senior SRE (1 yr 9 mos)

National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences

Visiting Lecturer (2 yrs 10 mos)

Tarabut Gateway - Now Hiring! 

Senior DevOps Engineer (1 yr 2 mos)

Dice Analytics

DevOps Trainer (4 yrs)

Aurora Solutions

Software & DevOps Engineer (2 yrs 7 mos)

Stakater

Lead DevOps Engineer (2 yrs 8 mos)

Bentley Systems

Associate Software Engineer (1 yr 10 mos)

LMKR

Intern (2 mos)

FAST-NUCES

Teaching Assistant (4 mos)

Education

Bachelor of Science (BS) at National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences

Ali Kahoot

CTO

Pakistan10 yrs 2 mos experience

Most Likely To SwitchHighly Stable

Key Highlights

Led infrastructure team achieving 100% uptime.
Trained over 800 professionals in Kubernetes and DevOps.
Pioneered DevOps practices in the MENA region.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a Fintech Infrastructure Expert with extensive experience in Kubernetes and DevOps.

Contact

Skills

Core Skills

KubernetesInfrastructure ManagementContinuous Delivery (cd)Devops

Other Skills

ASP.NETAWSAmazon Web Services (AWS)Android DevelopmentAnsibleBashCC#C++Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)DockerEFKElasticsearchGitGitOps

About

Experience

10 yrs 2 mos

Total Experience

2 yrs 1 mo

Average Tenure

4 yrs 2 mos

Current Experience

Pawapay

2 roles

Infrastructure Team Lead

Promoted

Jan 2024 – Present · 2 yrs 5 mos · Remote

As Head of Infrastructure at pawaPay, I lead the team responsible for building and maintaining the highly available, scalable, and secure platform powering mobile money payments across Africa.
Key Achievements:
Team Leadership: Hired, trained, and mentored a high-performing infrastructure team, building in-house expertise and driving a culture of reliability and automation.
100% Uptime: Achieved and sustained 100% platform uptime from Nov 2024 to present, ensuring uninterrupted financial transactions at scale. Can be checked at https://status.pawapay.cloud/
Massive Scale: Oversaw infrastructure that processed 2B+ transactions, with consistent growth across 20 African countries and continuing integrations with numerous telecom providers in Africa.
Technical Debt Reduction: Reduced overall infrastructure technical debt by 80%, streamlining deployments, improving reliability, and accelerating delivery.
ISO27001 Certification: Led the ISO27001 certification efforts from the infrastructure side, implementing best practices for security, compliance, and audit readiness.
Resilience & Connectivity: Designed and optimized multi-cloud, containerized systems supporting hundreds of microservices, ensuring resilience and compliance while scaling transaction volume.

KubernetesTeam LeadershipAmazon Web Services (AWS)KafkaMySQLInfrastructure Management+1

Senior SRE

Apr 2022 – Jan 2024 · 1 yr 9 mos · Remote

I addressed the company's infrastructure concerns by enhancing the platform's reliability. This involved improving observability across both infrastructure and applications, which we accomplished through the addition of metrics, logging & alerting. In addition, I successfully resolved technical debts by migrating manually created resources to Terraform. To enhance quality assurance, I implemented on-demand environments that allowed for the deployment of PRs for testing. Lastly, created a unified helm chart that can be readily templatized for any microservice.

KubernetesDockerJenkinsGithub ActionsContinuous Delivery (CD)MySQL+1

National university of computer and emerging sciences

Visiting Lecturer

Aug 2023 – Present · 2 yrs 10 mos · Islamabad, Islāmābād, Pakistan

Teaching DevOps elective course to the graduating batch and trying to bridge the gap between the academia and industry. Overall feedback was really great from students and got 95.77 rating as a trainer for the course.

Guest LecturingDevOpsTraining

Tarabut gateway - now hiring! 

Senior DevOps Engineer

Jan 2021 – Mar 2022 · 1 yr 2 mos

Hand-over in just 1 week from outsourced consultant
Managed the complete infrastructure single handedly for 7 months
Deployed & Managed Platform Apps(Monitoring, Logging, Ingress Controllers, Cert Manager, External DNS etc) using GitOps(ArgoCD) on AWS EKS
Developed CI/CD pipeline workflows and architecture for Microservices using Github Actions
Manage complete Infrastructure on AWS & Oracle Cloud using Terraform
Enabled secure communication with Bank's internal networks over secure site-to-site VPN using Fortigate
Set up Observability of the entire infrastructure & applications with Prometheus & Grafana for detailed monitoring and stats and alerts of apps, manage applications Uptime using Uptime Robot of external applications and Uptime Kuma for internal applications.
Setup detailed Logging using EFK stack of the entire infrastructure & applications
Interviewed and responsible for hiring new Resources

Dice analytics

DevOps Trainer

Jun 2019 – Jun 2023 · 4 yrs · Islamabad, Islāmābād, Pakistan

Conduct a professional hands on course of 8 weekends on DevOps covering Git, Github, Docker Containers, Docker Compose, Docker Swarm, Jenkins, Kubernetes, Helm and Ansible

Aurora solutions

Software & DevOps Engineer

May 2018 – Dec 2020 · 2 yrs 7 mos

Led the team Stakater in Aurora Solutions

Stakater

Lead DevOps Engineer

Apr 2018 – Dec 2020 · 2 yrs 8 mos · Islamabad

Led the team
Hired & mentored new resources and grew the team more than 200%
Worked closely in defining and implementing the architecture of Stakater
Architected & led the managed Openshift & Kubernetes offering
Architected different deployment workflows for Swedish customers. Mostly for CI, we used GitOps and for Continuous Delivery, used CIOps
Developed & Contributed to Opensource tools, We had open sourced almost 12 Kubernetes controllers, operators & simple add-ons for Kubernetes

Bentley systems

Associate Software Engineer

Jun 2016 – Apr 2018 · 1 yr 10 mos

Lmkr

Intern

Jun 2015 – Aug 2015 · 2 mos

Developed an Android application DocLocator through which one can find all the doctors in Islamabad using different search parameters. The database was parse based.