Damien Ridereau

Professional experience

1. 06/2026 - present

   Tokyo, Japan

   Senior Site Reliability Engineer

   Rakuten

   Major Japanese technology conglomerate (e-commerce, fintech, mobile). Incentive Platform Department: first SRE for both the Coupon (during its migration to Google Cloud) and Point platforms, now full time on the Point platform (Kubernetes across Rakuten’s private cloud and Google Cloud, behind Azure Front Door).

   • Proposed and designed a self-healing Valkey cluster on GCP for the Coupon platform (stateful regional MIGs, Packer golden images, automatic reconciliation when a node fails) to replace manual node management through Ansible playbooks, and presented the design to the team; preceded by Memorystore (Terraform) and self-managed Valkey (Ansible) proofs of concept.
   • Run weekly production releases (rehearsal, ArgoCD, Argo Rollouts, Jenkins jobs, post-release monitoring), including releases coordinated with other platform teams; staging then production on-call (PagerDuty) and incident investigations (database replication, cache latency during traffic peaks).
   • Reliability: rolled out Istio native sidecars in production (startup and shutdown ordering during rolling restarts), fixed log rotation on Ubuntu servers with Ansible (backup, rollback, commit), proposed a Jenkins safeguard validating TiCDC changefeed operations.
   • Designing a new staging environment on an existing GKE Autopilot cluster (ArgoCD ApplicationSets, Kafka, Azure Front Door, cost estimate, architecture diagram).
   • Scripted TLS certificate issuance through the DigiCert API and wrote renewal procedures for GKE and private cloud clusters (Vault, Google Secret Manager, ArgoCD), as a first step toward automation ahead of shorter certificate lifetimes.
   • Designed an LDAP to Grafana team synchronization (Helm chart, Kubernetes CronJob, ArgoCD, Vault) for least-privilege dashboard access; wrote release runbooks and gave technical presentations to the team.

   Stack

   • Google Cloud (GKE Autopilot, MIG, Memorystore)
   • Rakuten private cloud
   • Azure Front Door
   • Kubernetes
   • Istio
   • ArgoCD / Argo Rollouts
   • Helm
   • Terraform
   • Packer
   • Ansible
   • Jenkins
   • GitHub Actions
   • Valkey
   • TiDB / TiCDC
   • Kafka
   • Cassandra
   • Vault
   • Grafana
   • Prometheus
   • OpenSearch
   • PagerDuty

2. 02/2026 - 05/2026

   La Roche-sur-Yon, France

   DevOps Consultant (freelance)

   Groupe Atlantic

   French manufacturer of thermal comfort solutions (11,000 employees, nearly EUR 3 billion revenue). Mission for the security team: prepare the Digital Department’s .NET applications for containerization and Kubernetes, across five product lines.

   • Assessed 13 applications against 12-Factor App principles and identified six recurring Kubernetes blockers (in-memory state, file-based logging, missing health checks and SIGTERM handling, embedded configuration, HTTPS redirection conflicting with the Ingress).
   • Containerized 12 of the 13 applications (multi-stage, non-root images) and deployed them on Azure App Service, each with an Azure DevOps pipeline (Snyk scanning, Azure Container Registry).
   • Defined a remediation roadmap toward multi-instance deployments: Redis distributed cache, Azure Queue Storage / Service Bus, Polly, Key Vault with Workload Identity.
   • Delivered a hands-on Docker workshop for developers, wrote a Dockerfile and pod hardening guide, ran feedback sessions for developers and managers, and handed over open items at the end of the mission.

   Stack

   • .NET / ASP.NET Core
   • Docker
   • Azure DevOps
   • Azure Container Registry
   • Azure App Service
   • Key Vault
   • Entra ID / Managed Identity
   • Azure SQL
   • Snyk

3. 05/2023 - 12/2025

   Niort, France

   DevOps Engineer (freelance)

   MAIF

   French mutual insurance company (8,000 employees, EUR 4.7 billion revenue). Digital Factory, then owner of the Azure infrastructure of the Selfcare Digital XP squad from 01/2024.

   • Completed the migration to Azure: 20 environments migrated, processes automated, 20+ procedures written.
   • Security: moved central configuration secrets to Azure Key Vault and secured Azure Storage containers with SAS tokens.
   • Refactored the Pulumi (TypeScript) code base: Azure Native v2, drift fixes, multi-environment support, user-assigned managed identities to reduce role assignments.
   • Monitoring: Azure alerts in KQL (Cosmos DB), Grafana dashboards (Event Hubs, errors per URL), Prometheus alerts on microservice error rates, notified in Microsoft Teams.
   • Added cloud environments dedicated to regression testing; built a Node.js CLI for secrets management; ran a team workshop and documented deployment, secrets and alerting processes.

   Stack

   • Microsoft Azure
   • Pulumi (TypeScript)
   • Jenkins
   • Shell
   • Node.js
   • Cosmos DB
   • Event Hubs
   • Grafana
   • Prometheus

4. 10/2016 - 04/2023

   Nantes, France

   DevOps Engineer, Full Stack Tech Lead, Senior Designer

   U TECH (Système U)

   IT department of a French supermarket chain (460 employees; EUR 23 billion revenue for the cooperative group).

   • DevOps Engineer, Kubernetes platform team (1.5 years): operated and evolved a hybrid Kubernetes platform (Google Cloud, Rancher, Terraform, Ansible / AWX), resolved incidents (Nagios, Prometheus), built a Prometheus to Google Chat alerting webhook, trained users, ran the cloud community newsletter (100+ readers).
   • Full Stack Tech Lead, software engineering (3 years): project starter architectures and application foundations (Java / Spring, Vue.js); raised quality standards: 70% unit test coverage on the business layer (versus 10 to 20%), Sonar grade B minimum (versus D/E), no critical XRay flaws; mentoring and development guidelines approved by the steering committee.
   • Full Stack Tech Lead, GESCOM team (1 year): operations and reliability of 100+ sales management applications (orders, supplier contracts, products), steering of service providers, onboarding of newcomers.
   • Senior Designer, Courses U (15 months): redesigned the local products backend and planned the rollout of a stock management application for 1,600 stores (integrated system impacting 500+ processes).

   Stack

   • Kubernetes
   • Google Cloud
   • Rancher
   • Terraform
   • Ansible / AWX
   • Prometheus
   • Jenkins
   • Artifactory
   • Java
   • Spring
   • Vue.js
   • PostgreSQL
   • DB2

5. 2008 - 2016

   Earlier experience

   • InfotelParis / The Hague (the Netherlands), 05/2012 - 09/2016

     Technical Project Manager, Tech Lead and Java EE developer for the European Patent Office: led agile projects (Prince2, MS Project) in a regulated environment, managed a 4-person team, designed a REST/HAL microservice application, industrialized and released GROBID to production (machine learning based data extraction).

   • AtosRennes / Nantes / Orléans / Clermont-Ferrand, 02/2008 - 04/2012

     Java EE developer for SNCF, SFR, KPN (the Netherlands), Michelin and La Poste: design, development, testing and production releases.

   Every assignment is described in detail in the detailed resume.Detailed resume (PDF)