DevOps, SRE & AI integration for startups · Remote from Lahore (UTC+5)

I make startup infrastructure secure, compliant and cheaper to run.

Senior DevOps/SRE. By day I run PCI DSS payment infrastructure in production on AWS, Huawei Cloud, Kubernetes and Terraform. I also help businesses put AI to work, in their operations and in production, without runaway costs. Fixed-price packages, not open-ended hours.

Overlaps US East Coast mornings and the full Gulf working day.

Hands-on in production with PCI DSS ISO/IEC 27001 AWS Huawei Cloud Kubernetes Terraform Ansible GitHub Actions

Problems I fix

If one of these is on your plate this quarter, we should talk.

01

The cloud bill keeps climbing

Idle resources, oversized instances, no commitments. Flexera's 2026 survey puts wasted cloud spend at 29%.

02

Deploys feel risky

Manual steps, no rollback, and one person who knows how it all works.

03

Certificates expire and take you down

From March 15, 2027, public TLS certificates max out at 100 days. Manual renewal stops scaling.

04

An audit is coming

SOC 2 or PCI DSS controls your compliance platform keeps flagging: IAM, MFA, logging, encryption, backups.

05

Customers find outages first

No dashboards, no alerts, no on-call runbook for the night something breaks.

06

AI is stuck in a demo, or costs too much

Pilots that never ship, token bills nobody forecast, and customer data sent to models without guardrails.

Not sure where you stand? Start with a 5-day Infrastructure Health Check →

DevOps & SRE packages

Fixed scope. Fixed price. Clear deliverables.

Every engagement starts read-only. Prices in USD; 50% upfront, 50% on delivery.

Cloud Cost Teardown

1–2 weeks

$1,200–2,000

Bill and usage analysis, rightsizing, commitments, storage and egress, idle resources. Quick wins implemented, not just listed.

At least 2× the fee in annualised savings, or no charge. For teams spending $3,000+ a month on cloud.

Cert & Secrets Automation

1–2 weeks

$2,000–4,000

Inventory every certificate, automate renewal with ACME and cert-manager, add expiry alerts and a rotation runbook. Ready for 100-day certificates.

CI/CD + IaC Foundation

2–4 weeks

$3,000–6,000

Terraform modules, GitHub Actions pipelines, environments, secrets management and rollback your whole team can trust.

Compliance Infra Readiness

2–4 weeks

$3,000–8,000

SOC 2 or PCI DSS: I fix the infrastructure controls your compliance platform flags, from IAM and MFA to logging, encryption, backups and access reviews.

Fractional DevOps/SRE

monthly · 3-month minimum

Up to 20–30 hours a month across DevOps, SRE and AI operations, business-hours support and a monthly report. Ideal until your first DevOps hire starts.

$1,500–3,000 / month

AI integration

Put AI to work in your business, at a cost that makes sense.

I help teams pick the AI use cases worth paying for, automate repetitive work, and run AI features in production with the same security and cost discipline I apply to payments infrastructure.

AI Opportunity & Cost Review

3–5 days

$750

I map your workflows, find the 3–5 tasks where AI saves real hours, estimate the monthly model cost of each, and pick models and vendors that meet your privacy needs. You get a costed build plan.

AI Workflow Automation

1–3 weeks

$1,500–4,000

One business process automated end to end: support triage, document and invoice processing, lead research or internal reporting. Human review where it matters, full logging and hard spend caps.

Production AI Integration

2–4 weeks

$3,000–8,000

LLM features shipped into your product safely: keys in a secrets manager, rate limits and per-customer spend caps, PII redaction, fallbacks across providers, evaluations, and cost and latency dashboards.

How I keep your AI bill low

  • Right-size the model: route simple tasks to small, cheap models and keep frontier models for the hard ones
  • Cache prompts and responses, and batch work that is not urgent
  • Hard budgets per feature and per customer, with alerts before the bill surprises you
  • Self-host open-weight models only when your volume makes it cheaper
  • Your data stays yours: no-retention API settings, PII redaction and audit logs
Book the AI Review

Selected work

Production stories from a regulated payments stack.

Company and client details are anonymised. Full write-ups will follow.

Payments · PCI DSS scope

Emergency mTLS certificate rotation across ~30 microservices

Problem
A critical mTLS certificate expiry hit ~30 services at once, plus the wildcard certificate on the load balancer.
What I did
Rotated certificates across every affected service and the load balancer, and brought service-to-service traffic back up.
mTLSKubernetesLoad balancer
Payments · private network

CI/CD into private production with zero inbound access

Problem
Production servers sit on private IPs, so push-based deploys meant opening the network.
What I did
Built pull-based GitHub Actions deploys: artifacts land in object storage, a serverless function triggers an on-host agent that pulls and deploys.
GitHub ActionsHuawei CloudServerless trigger
Payments · card issuing

Encrypted card-file pipeline with a card-production bureau

Problem
Card embossing files had to reach an external bureau with nothing exposed in transit.
What I did
SFTP with PGP encryption to the bureau's RSA key, plus IP allowlisting through the NAT gateway.
SFTPPGPNAT allowlisting
Payments · AI-assisted build

Automated, PAN-free reporting pipeline

Problem
Card-network reports arrived encrypted over SFTP and needed pulling, decrypting and forwarding by hand.
What I did
A Node.js pipeline, built with Claude Code, that pulls, decrypts and emails the reports, verified to carry no card numbers.
Node.jsSFTP + PGPClaude Code

How I work

Four steps, and you own everything at the end.

  1. 01

    Audit

    Read-only access. I map what you run, what it costs and where it can fail.

  2. 02

    Plan

    A prioritised 30/60/90-day plan with a fixed price for each step.

  3. 03

    Implement

    Changes through code review and infrastructure as code, not console clicks.

  4. 04

    Handover

    Runbooks, diagrams and a walkthrough so your team runs it without me.

FAQ

Questions founders ask before we start.

How much does a freelance DevOps consultant cost?

My work is fixed-price, so you know the cost before anything starts. The Infrastructure Health Check is $750 for my first three clients, then $1,500. Projects run $1,200–8,000 depending on scope, and fractional DevOps/SRE support is $1,500–3,000 a month.

Can you reduce our AWS or cloud bill?

Yes. The Cloud Cost Teardown reviews usage, rightsizing, commitments, storage and egress, then implements the quick wins. For teams spending $3,000 or more a month on cloud, I guarantee at least twice the fee in annualised savings or you pay nothing.

Do you help startups get ready for SOC 2 or PCI DSS?

Yes. I run PCI DSS-scoped payment infrastructure in production, and I fix the infrastructure controls auditors and compliance platforms check: IAM, MFA, logging, encryption, backups and access reviews. I don’t issue audit reports; I get your infrastructure ready for your auditor.

How do you keep AI costs low in production?

By sending each task to the cheapest model that does it well, caching prompts and responses, batching work that isn’t urgent, and putting hard spend limits on every feature and customer. Self-hosting open-weight models only makes sense at high volume, and I’ll tell you when it does.

Can you integrate AI into our existing product or business workflows?

Yes. I can automate a single workflow, such as support triage or document processing, or ship LLM features into your product behind your existing authentication, logging and monitoring, with privacy controls and cost dashboards from day one.

Which time zones do you work with?

I’m in Lahore, Pakistan (UTC+5). That overlaps US East Coast mornings, most of the UK and European working day, and the full Gulf working day.

How do we get started?

Email [email protected] to book a free 20-minute call. If there’s a fit, the Health Check or AI Review starts with read-only access, usually within a week.

About

Hi, I'm Usama.

I'm a Senior DevOps Engineer in Lahore with 4+ years running production infrastructure, today for a payments company where PCI DSS isn't optional. I take on a small number of startup projects alongside that work, so each one gets senior attention.

My favourite problems are the unglamorous ones: certificates, keys, access and audits, plus the cloud bill nobody has looked at in a year. Lately that includes AI: getting it out of the demo and into production, safely and at a sensible cost.

BSc Computer Science, GC University Lahore · AWS · Huawei Cloud · Kubernetes · Terraform · Ansible

Book a free 20-minute infra or AI review.

Bring your cloud bill, your deploy process, your audit deadline or your AI idea. You'll leave with three concrete next steps, whether or not we work together.