Ilia Zlobin Profile Photo I’m a Principal Software Engineer in New York City with 12+ years building and operating large-scale distributed systems and cloud-native platforms across AWS, GCP, and Azure. My focus is on architecting infrastructure platforms and automation frameworks that improve developer productivity, ensure reliability, and scale to enterprise demands. I bring deep expertise in AI/ML, integrating AI-driven automation and robust MLOps to accelerate innovation at organizational scale.

Career Focus

  • Platform Engineering — architecting and operating multi-cloud landing zones, enterprise-grade Kubernetes platforms, developer portals, and GitOps-driven workflows at scale.
  • Cloud-Native Infrastructure — extensive experience with AWS, GCP, and Azure; led organizational migrations of 200+ services across 2,000+ Kubernetes nodes, establishing standardized infrastructure patterns.
  • Distributed Systems — designing and scaling data pipelines, observability platforms, and developer productivity solutions for organization-wide adoption.

(For a detailed work history, see my Resume page.)

Professional Interests

  • AI & ML Platform Engineering — architecting scalable training and inference pipelines, agent-based frameworks, GPU-accelerated clusters, and end-to-end orchestration for applied machine learning solutions.
  • Developer Experience & Productivity — enabling streamlined development workflows through golden paths, ephemeral environments, and robust self-service platforms that optimize velocity while maintaining governance.
  • Site Reliability Engineering — implementing resilient architectures with multi-region disaster recovery, cost optimization strategies, and observability-driven operations to ensure system reliability and performance.

Top Side Projects

  • AI Concierge Agent — Automated event discovery, registration, and scheduling using agentic orchestration and browser automation.
  • Events Pipeline — Serverless event ingestion and hybrid ranking for real-time discovery.
  • DSPy Research — Experiments in declarative LLM workflows, prompt optimization, and pipeline evaluation with DSPy.
  • Transformer Labs — Hands-on fine-tuning of transformer models (LoRA, quantization, evaluation frameworks) for NLP tasks.
  • Voicematch Labs — Speech/audio analysis toolkit and AI-powered pronunciation platform for language learners, featuring ML models, cloud-native APIs, and interactive feedback.
  • Atmos Landing Zones — Secure, automated multi-account AWS/Kubernetes provisioning using Terraform and Helmfile.

(Full details, system design charts, and videos are on my Portfolio page.)

Outside of Work

I try to balance all the tech with a few passions:

  • Sports & Fitness — I love working out, running, and keeping active.
  • Travel & Exploration — whether it’s conferences, local events, or hopping on a plane to a new city, I enjoy being around ideas and smart people.
  • Events & Communities — I often attend (and sometimes speak at) tech conferences and meetups.