About / Systems, platforms, and the path between
Platform engineering grounded in production reality.
I’m Cristian Gómez Aranda — a Platform Engineer and SRE with eight years operating critical systems at Citibanamex. I work where reliability, Linux infrastructure, and Kubernetes networking meet.
- Automation
- ~22,500 annual hours of manual work removed through automation
- Recovery
- A critical recovery path reduced from ~4 hours to 15 minutes
- Experience
- 8 years keeping high-stakes production systems operable
How I work
Start with the mechanism. Design for the person on call.
My strongest work happens below the abstraction layer: the namespace, the iptables rule, the conntrack table, the systemd unit, and the operational decision that determines whether an incident becomes routine or catastrophic.
In that environment, when something breaks at 2 AM, you may have 15 minutes before it affects millions of transactions. Eight years in banking taught me that infrastructure is never only technical: good platform work makes risk visible, removes unnecessary manual effort, and gives engineers a safe path to move faster.
That depth is a deliberate choice, not a gap: I go past the managed-cloud abstraction layer — the Helm chart, the console click, the Terraform apply — on purpose, because understanding what is actually running underneath a platform is what turns an incident into something routine instead of something mysterious. Most platforms are operated by people who stopped at the abstraction. I kept going.
That depth doesn't stay solo, either. Inside the bank, I built and delivered internal training on production operations and AI-assisted automation tooling — video walkthroughs, automation guides, Copilot usage guides — and ran live sessions for the wider production team. None of that material is public; it lived inside the bank's internal systems. But the habit is the same one behind this site: understand something deeply, then make it legible for the next person.
Kubernetes networking
Namespaces, veth pairs, iptables, kube-proxy, CoreDNS, CNI fundamentals, and the full packet path.
Linux systems
RHEL-family operating systems, cgroups, systemd, containers, and the primitives that make a platform run.
Reliable operations
Automation, observability, incident response, and infrastructure decisions that are traceable and defensible.
Public work
Evidence over a tool list.
Now / 2026–27
Preparing for AI workload infrastructure.
I’m deepening my Kubernetes networking and platform fundamentals through hands-on projects and public writing. Next, I’m studying how those foundations support secure, observable AI workloads through model serving, multi-tenancy, network isolation, and operational evidence.
Open to remote Platform Engineer and SRE roles with teams running Kubernetes in production — based in Mexico City, strong overlap with US business hours.
Email me LinkedIn