Defeng Li

Background

About Defeng Li

I am a high-performing Site Reliability Engineer and Cloud Infrastructure expert with over 20 years of experience designing, building, and maintaining scalable and reliable systems. I specialize in ensuring high availability, optimizing performance, and reducing operational toil in complex production environments. I have contributed to multiple successful startup exits through strong infrastructure architecture, automation, and observability practices. I actively leverage AI-assisted tools to enhance development speed and code quality. CAREER HIGHLIGHTS * DeleteMe – Built and operated a scalable, highly available AWS and Kubernetes platform supporting 5x revenue growth. Implemented observability and compliance controls that enabled SOC 2 Type 2 certification within 18 months.* Altruist – As the first DevOps/SRE, established production-grade AWS infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines, enabling the reliable launch of the company’s flagship product within 6 months.* Turnitin – Led a large-scale migration from on-premises to cloud. Deployed and managed Kubernetes clusters to support microservices architecture, enhancing system scalability and reliability. Introduced Infrastructure as Code using Terraform and automated CI/CD processes, reducing deployment errors and increasing release frequency.* Zuora – Reduced operational toil by automating hybrid cloud deployments with Terraform and Ansible. Improved uptime and deployment consistency for mission-critical subscription services.