CV - Lead Platform Engineer

In position but open to new opportunities in Japan

Location: Anywhere in Japan, or worldwide remote with occasional workation travel (a few weeks per year). WFH required more than 1 day a week
Expected compensation: ¥14M+ annually
Current level: Grade AA at Rakuten (reference salary data)
Contact: resume @ benoit.jp.net

benoit@brain:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo | head -20

Human Processor Specifications
processor       : 0
vendor_id       : Benoit-Industries               #(1)!
cpu family      : Lead Platform Engineer
model           : Infrastructure & Automation
model name      : platform-engineer-mk15          #(2)!
cpu MHz         : 2Hz baseline, 10Hz turbo mode   #(3)!
cache size      : 15+ years of production knowledge
cpu cores       : Single brain, multi-threaded thinking
siblings        : Works well in teams
flags           : curious, adaptable, problem-solver, caffeine-optimized, japan-ready
bugs            : May get overly excited about infrastructure automation
bogomips        : Immeasurable when debugging at 3 AM

Custom-engineered human processor optimized for system reliability
15-year production model with continuous updates and patches
Performance scales exponentially with coffee intake

Career Journey & Education

From French technical schools to Japanese tech innovation

flowchart LR
    A["🎓 CAP AMMB<br/>🇫🇷 Colomiers"] --> B["🎓 BAC PRO MRIM<br/>🇫🇷 Colomiers"]
    B --> C["🎓 BTS IG ARLE<br/>🇫🇷 Toulouse"]
    C --> D["🎓 LPRO SIL ASR<br/>🇫🇷 Metz"]
    D --> E["💼 Evolix<br/>Linux System Administrator<br/>🇫🇷 Marseille<br/>2011-2019"]
    E --> F["✈️ Big Move<br/>2019"]
    F --> G["💼 Rakuten<br/>Lead Platform Engineer<br/>🇯🇵 Tokyo<br/>2021-Present"]
    G --> H["🚀 Future<br/>Platform Architect"]

Career Progression Timeline:

2008-2011: 📚 Technical education foundation in France
2011-2019: 🛠️ Linux System Administrator
2019: 🌏 Moved to Japan, spent a year on a sabbatical exploring and immersing in the culture
2021-Present: ☁️ Lead Platform Engineer
Future: 🎯 Aspiring Platform Architect

Rakuten Japan (2021→Present) Evolix (2011→2020)

Lead Platform Engineer | Internet Services, FinTech, and Mobile

Current Role Highlights

Infrastructure Scale: Managing multi-region cloud deployments
Team Impact: Eliminated manual operations through automation (e.g., full Kubernetes cluster upgrades)
Technology Stack: Kubernetes, Docker, GCP, Terraform, Chef, Laminar CI, Git, On-premise bare-metal

Key Achievements:

├── Bootstrapped platform infrastructure from scratch for data science and engineering teams
├── Formed and led the platform engineering team where none existed before
├── Established processes, operations guidelines, and incident response playbooks
├── Initiated comprehensive documentation project with MkDocs (later Zensical)
├── Deployed and maintained large-scale Kubernetes clusters (hundreds of nodes) via Chef
├── Built and operated Rook-Ceph storage clusters (PiB-scale, NVMe and HDD tiers)
├── Built custom CI/CD solution with Laminar CI and justfile for full automation lifecycle
│   ├── Automated machine provisioning with Terraform
│   ├── Configuration management and deployment via Chef
│   ├── Integration testing with Test Kitchen and Vagrant
│   ├── Automated documentation builds and publishing
│   ├── Encrypted credentials management with git-crypt
│   └── End-to-end automated workflow from infrastructure to application
├── Deployed and maintained Prometheus stack with federation across all Kubernetes clusters
├── Maintained cluster health with regular updates and security patches
├── Conducted internal Docker and Kubernetes training (classes of ~20 employees)
├── Mentored junior engineers on best practices
└── Led migration of legacy systems to containerized infrastructure

Systems Administrator | French Open Source Managed Hosting Provider, Marseille, France

9-Year Open Source Journey

Culture: Pure open source shop, no proprietary software, ever
Team: ~10 passionate sysadmins, collaborative and deeply technical
Clients: 50–100 SMBs and 10–30 larger clients under SLA
Progression: Joined as junior, grew into senior sysadmin role
Open Source: All tools and solutions publicly available at gitea.evolix.org
Wiki: Extensive French technical documentation, a source of pride, wiki.evolix.org

Key Achievements:

├── Main maintainer of Evolinux, Evolix's custom Debian-based distribution
│   ├── Initiated and built the dialog-based interactive installer scripting
│   ├── Long-term maintenance across many server deployments
│   └── Eventually handed over; project later rewritten in Ansible
├── Mail hosting stack (Postfix, Dovecot, SpamAssassin, Amavis, ClamAV)
│   ├── Greylisting with Postgrey, DKIM/SPF/DMARC configuration
│   ├── Roundcube webmail and custom PHP mail admin dashboard (extended features)
│   └── Virtual domain management via LDAP and custom solution
├── Web hosting platform
│   ├── Apache + Nginx + HAProxy + ProFTPD
│   ├── LXC containers for per-client PHP version isolation
│   ├── mod_security WAF, Redis and Memcached caching layers
│   ├── Squid transparent proxy, default outbound whitelist for all managed servers
│   └── Contributed to Evoboost, internal HAProxy + Varnish reverse proxy cache
├── High-availability virtualization
│   ├── KVM + libvirt + DRBD, active/passive and active/active configurations
│   └── ~dozen HA nodes with VM failover across KVM hosts
├── Storage
│   ├── mdadm software RAID, extensive usage, wrote automated install scripts
│   │   for bare-metal provisioning on Dedibox and OVH servers
│   ├── LVM, iSCSI for clients with large storage needs (Samba environments)
│   └── NFS, disk quotas for hosted clients
├── Backup infrastructure, Evobackup (rsync + hardlinks)
│   └── Contributed to btrfs snapshot-based backup improvements
├── Monitoring and observability
│   ├── Nagios/Icinga with custom check plugins
│   ├── Munin with custom plugins, contributed to upstream Munin plugins repo
│   ├── Netdata for real-time debugging alongside Nagios/Munin
│   ├── SNMP + Cacti + PHP Network Weathermap (built network topology map)
│   ├── GoAccess for web log analysis and client reporting
│   └── logcheck, maintained and extended custom regex rule sets
├── Security hardening
│   ├── fail2ban with custom jails, iptables + minifirewall custom ruleset
│   ├── OpenVPN and WireGuard tunnels, mod_security WAF
│   ├── SSL/TLS management (manual certs → Let's Encrypt migration)
│   └── Security audits with lynis and custom scripts
├── Client services deployed and managed
│   ├── GitLab (multiple major versions), Mattermost, Nextcloud
│   ├── Elasticsearch, Mastodon (main maintainer of Evolix instance)
│   └── Load testing client websites with Tsung
├── Databases, MySQL/MariaDB (replication, backups), PostgreSQL, MongoDB
├── LDAP directory for Samba and Postfix virtual domain auth
├── Networking, OpenBSD + PF + CARP, VLAN management, link bonding
│   VRRP and Cisco switch configuration (light), native IPv6
├── Multi-provider bare-metal and cloud, OVH, Dedibox, Gandi
│   AWS, Azure, GCP (light exposure)
├── Physical server builds, RAM/CPU/disk installs, rack mounting, IPMI/iDRAC
│   S.M.A.R.T. analysis, hardware failure diagnosis and intervention
├── Built internal .deb packages for Evolix tooling
├── On-call (astreinte), 24/7 incident response with SLA enforcement
├── Client onboarding, support, and organized team ticket-clearing sessions
├── Contributed to extensive public technical documentation (wiki.evolix.org)
└── Bug reports contributed to Debian BTS and upstream open source projects

benoit@brain:~$ locale -a | grep -E '(fr|en|ja)'

French    ██████████ 100% (Native)     #(1)!
English   ████████░░  90% (TOEIC 910)  #(2)!
Japanese  ████░░░░░░  40% (N3 level)   #(3)!

Parle français couramment! Born and raised
Professional proficiency in technical environments
日本語を勉強しています (N3 level achieved, aiming for N2!)

Certifications & Achievements

Language Certifications:

Experience:

benoit@brain:~$ ls -la ~/passions

total 5
drwxr-xr-x 2 benoit benoit 4096 Jan 01 1970 .
drwxr-xr-x 5 benoit benoit 4096 Jan 01 1970 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 benoit benoit  ∞   Jan 01 1970 hiking.passion             #(1)!
-rw-r--r-- 1 benoit benoit  ∞   Jan 01 1970 road_trips.passion         #(2)!
-rw-r--r-- 1 benoit benoit  ∞   Jan 01 1970 japanese_culture.passion   #(3)!
-rw-r--r-- 1 benoit benoit  ∞   Jan 01 1970 photography.passion        #(4)!
-rw-r--r-- 1 benoit benoit  ∞   Jan 01 1970 opensource_hacking.passion #(5)!

Logging every trail with Garmin and fit_to_md.py
Multi-day circuits across Japan, aiming to drive through all 47 prefectures — road trip logs
Especially pop culture and traditions
Landscape and street photography enthusiast
The eternal FLOSS passion!

benoit@brain:~$ systemctl status nginx

● nginx.service - The nginx HTTP and reverse proxy server
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/nginx.service; enabled)
   Active: active (running)
https://benoit.jp.net                   This website using Zensical  #(1)!
https://forgejo.benoit.jp.net           Git hosting (Forgejo)        #(2)!
https://mastodon.benoit.jp.net/@benoit  Mastodon instance            #(3)!

Technical documentation hub
Self-hosted Git repositories
Federated social media

Need More Info?

Email: resume benoit.jp.net

[benoit@brain ~]$ exit
Connection to benoit.jp.net closed.

cv resume geek terminal systems-engineer devops japan