Üllar Maasik

About Me

April 25, 2025

Introduction

I’m a senior engineer with nearly a decade of infrastructure experience, currently leading projects on the Infrastructure team at XYB. Originally from Estonia, I specialize in designing and maintaining robust systems that enhance user experience, whether for internal teams or external customers.

My technical expertise includes:

programming languages: Bash, Python, and Go (with a knack for learning new languages)
infrastructure as code: Terraform (primary), Chef, and Ansible
cloud platforms: AWS, Azure, GCP
documentation: creating comprehensive technical documentation, developing engineering playbooks, and implementing best practices across teams

Words matter to me as much as code. I truly enjoy writing clear documentation that doesn’t sound like it was generated by an AI. When I explain a technical concept, I aim to provide context not only to my future self, but to anyone else who has ever struggled to grasp something that was perfectly clear at an earlier point in time.

Contacts

Experience

XYB

Senior Cloud DevOps Engineer from March 2024–today

Led migration from Jenkins’ CI/CD to GitHub Actions with novel automation around workflow creation and workflow distribution, reducing build times about 30%.
Lowered front-end website costs by tens of thousands of dollars annually by critically reconsidering our approach.
Architecting an infrastructure platform for customers requiring scalability and something that is thought through end-to-end.

Keywords: AWS, Argo CD, CI/CD, CUE, GitHub, Kubernetes, Python, Terraform

Notes: started as a Cloud DevOps Engineer, promoted to Senior Cloud DevOps Engineer in January 2025

RangeForce

DevSecOps Engineer from December 2019–June 2024

Created a robust infrastructure to support instantiation of virtual-machine-based learning content in Azure.
Ensured reproducibility by creating continuous deployment pipelines.
Developed internal tooling for developers to quickly and comfortably interact with the back-end required to create learning content for end users.
Built a cross-platform command-and-control (C2) application in Go (supporting Linux and Windows) to recreate realistic threat scenarios for cybersecurity education.
Led push to manage the entirety of the infrastructure with Ansible and Terraform.

Reason for leaving: something in me wanted to put down roots in a new company

Keywords: Ansible, Azure, Bash, CI/CD, Docker, Flask, GitLab, Go, Python, Terraform

Skype/Microsoft

Service Engineer 2 from April 2016–December 2019

Created automation to ease maintenance across a heterogeneous infrastructure.
- Implemented a configuration management system for physical servers running Hyper-V using Chef and Desired State Configuration.
- Developed PowerShell tooling enabling end users of our infrastructure to have visibility as to when their virtual machines are scheduled for downtime as a part of regular maintenance and enable the ability for them to automatically notify us of any postponements per virtual machine.
Upheld best practices by adhering to and creating standards of procedures for various tasks in day-to-day activities as well as documenting anything that might have the danger of being known to only one person.
Administered VPN gateways, provided assistance to end-users with VPN-related issues, and spearheaded migration to Microsoft’s own VPN solution.

Reason for leaving: to work closer to the end user where my day-to-day work would have a more immediate impact

Keywords: Azure, Bash, Chef, CI/CD, DSC, Hyper-V, PowerShell

Notes: started as a Service Engineer, promoted to Service Engineer 2 in March 2018

AS Eesti Telekom

Datacenter hardware management duty technician from April 2014–January 2015

Installed physical hardware including cabling (e.g. servers, routers, switches, firewalls, disk arrays, controllers etc.).
Did basic systems configuration and management through HP Integrated Lights-Out
- Scripting with Bash and PowerShell.
Monitored servers and services across multiple data centers with Opsview
- Wrote documentation to improve future work.

Reason for leaving: to spend the last semester of college studying abroad in the Technological Educational Institute of Crete

Keywords: Bash, PowerShell

Education

Certified LPIC-1 Linux Server Professional

LPI ID: LPI000352151
Verification code: vvz4wzjzvv

Topics learned cover all the basic skills that are common to major Linux distributions, such as software installation and package management, scripting, data management, administrative tasks, networking fundamentals and security. More information can be found here and by viewing the individual 101 and 102 exam objectives.

The Estonian Information Technology College

BSc, majored in IT systems administration from 2011–2015

Participated in the 2014 Erasmus intensive course “Deploying IT Infrastructure Solutions” with the team project “Visualization of Municipality’s Budget”

Thesis subject: Creating Intelligent Storage Systems Study Materials to Renew Course Learning Resources [by the Example of the Estonian Information Technology College]

Tallinn’s 32nd High School

GSE, emphasis on multimedia and mathematics from 2001-2011

Projects