Cloud Platform · AWS · Delivery Reality

Tony Zaarour — practical platform leadership.

Cloud Platform Architect / Senior Platform Engineer with hands-on experience designing, governing, and modernising AWS platforms in regulated and enterprise environments.

Best fit: messy estates that need clearer guardrails, stronger operating boundaries, better automation, and less platform theatre.

Download resume

Selected impact

What changes when I'm useful.

5+
Years AWS
Platform architecture & delivery
20→0
Dropouts Fixed
Australian Museum critical site
$$$
Cost Impact
Annual savings via optimisation
ECS
Modernised
Legacy → event-driven patterns

Core strengths

Where I tend to add value fastest.

  • AWS platform architecture and multi-account governance
  • Compliance, audit readiness, and security controls
  • Infrastructure as code and platform automation
  • Event-driven workload modernisation
  • CI/CD, observability, and operational tooling
  • Cost optimisation and utilisation management
  • Documentation, enablement, and operational handover
  • Practical architecture grounded in delivery reality

Recent roles

Squiz
Senior DevOps Engineer
May 2024 – Present
  • Owned the internal AWS platform across a complex multi-account environment supporting shared operational workloads.
  • Acted as the de facto platform architect for major initiatives across governance, compliance, workload modernisation, and cloud operations.
  • Built reporting, alerting, and guardrail capabilities to improve audit readiness and compliance execution.
  • Improved platform governance through control redesign and organisation-wide guardrails.
  • Modernised long-running workloads into event-driven ECS task patterns, reducing reliance on oversized always-on compute.
  • Managed commitment optimisation and cloud efficiency work that delivered material annual savings.
  • Led the AWS side of migration from data centre to AWS, including documentation and team enablement.
Versent
DevOps Engineer
Mar 2021 – Apr 2024
  • Delivered cloud infrastructure, automation, and operational improvements for enterprise client environments.
  • Built reusable deployment tooling, reporting modules, alarm automation, and private API monitoring capabilities.
  • Designed and implemented a serverless anti-virus solution using Trend Cloud One.
  • Led migration from legacy email infrastructure to AWS SES with stronger security and operational controls.
  • Built CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions and ECS runners with OIDC-based short-lived AWS access.
AXE Group
Junior DevSecOps Engineer
Jan 2020 – Feb 2021
  • Automated deployments, Linux configuration, and security-related operational tasks.
  • Maintained Ansible playbooks and environment management workflows.
  • Built Shell, Bash, and PowerShell tooling for deployment and operational support.
OpenMRS
Junior DevOps Engineer
Apr 2019 – Feb 2020
  • Supported infrastructure and platform operations for the OpenMRS open-source community.

Tools and platforms

Cloud
AWS Organizations Control Tower IAM Identity Center SSO
Infrastructure as Code
Terraform AWS CDK CloudFormation
Containers & Compute
ECS Fargate Lambda Step Functions EC2 SSM Docker
CI/CD & Automation
GitLab CI GitHub Actions AWS CodePipeline Python Bash JavaScript TypeScript
Security & Observability
Security Hub AWS Config GuardDuty Inspector CloudWatch Dynatrace Sumo Logic Cloudflare AWS WAF Vanta

Direct links

Verify the work.