Platform from zero
VPC, EKS, databases, storage, secrets and pipelines — codified in Terraform from day one. You end up with a platform your developers deploy to themselves, and the documentation to run it without me.
Independent infrastructure consulting · since 2024
I build and fix the infrastructure your product runs on.
Kubernetes, Terraform and AWS — from an empty cloud account to a platform your developers deploy to on their own, plus the Go and Python tooling that makes it usable. Fifteen years of it, the last two as a one-person consultancy.
15M users
on a platform I built from scratch
15+ years
bare metal, cloud-native, blockchain
100s trained
engineers taught Kubernetes & Terraform
12 certs
CKA · 4× AWS · RHCE and more
Services
What I actually do
Three kinds of engagement. Most work starts in one and drifts into the others — that's fine, it's the same person doing all of it.
Build
Greenfield — from an empty account to productionSoftware & internal tooling
Go and Python services, CLIs and Kubernetes controllers — the software that makes infrastructure usable. I open-sourced a controller that other Cosmos teams adopted, and I build and operate my own products end to end.
Blockchain & node infrastructure
Cosmos and EVM validators, RPC endpoints, IBC relayers and bridges. Node operations that survive chain upgrades, with the monitoring to prove they did. Rare enough that most teams can't hire for it.
Improve
You have infrastructure — it needs to get faster, cheaper or saferModernisation & audit
Cluster upgrades, resource right-sizing, Helm and GitOps adoption, an AWS cost review, and a security pass over IAM, network segmentation and secrets handling. Findings you can action — not a PDF.
CI/CD & developer platform
Pipeline redesign and migration — GitLab to GitHub Actions, Drone, Jenkins — plus secret management, release workflow and developer onboarding. Deploys that take minutes and that nobody is afraid to run on a Friday.
Observability & SRE practice
Grafana and Prometheus dashboards that answer questions people actually ask, alerting that only pages for things worth waking up for, and the SLO and on-call practice around it.
Enable
Leaving the team better than I found itAI-assisted infrastructure
LangChain, LangSmith, n8n and agent tooling wired into infrastructure and the delivery loop. I use this daily in my own work — including shipping a full mobile app solo — so the advice comes from running it, not reading about it.
Training
Kubernetes, Terraform and Docker courses, delivered to hundreds of engineers. I designed the curriculum and led the training business at Polar Squad, so this is a built practice rather than a slide deck.
Work highlights
Six engagements worth describing
Fourteen more engagements, in full detail, on the CV.
Products
Things I own and run
Consulting is most of the work, but I ship and operate my own software too — which is where a lot of the AI-assisted delivery practice comes from.
About
Who you're actually hiring
I'm Joonas Lehtimäki. I've spent fifteen years building infrastructure — starting on bare metal and sysadmin work, moving through DevOps consulting for banks, telecoms, insurers and government agencies, and then into cloud-native and blockchain platforms.
At Warden Labs I was a founding member and built the entire Kubernetes platform from scratch; it went on to serve 15 million users. Before that I owned the infrastructure for Archway at Phi Labs, worked across the Cosmos ecosystem at Ignite, and at Polar Squad I established the training business and led the Kubernetes and Terraform courses.
I also write software, heavily. Go and Python day to day, an open-source Kubernetes controller that other teams in the Cosmos ecosystem picked up, internal tooling for a government agency's platform team — and the two products below, which I built and operate end to end.
jlehtimaki Consulting is one person by design. There's no bench, no account manager, and no handover to a junior after the sales call — the engineer you talk to is the engineer who does the work. It also means I take end-to-end ownership, from architecture through to production operations, and I'll tell you early if a job isn't a good fit for me.
Got infrastructure to build — or to rescue?
Tell me what you're running, what hurts, and roughly when you need it. I'll tell you honestly whether I'm the right person for the job.