Building a Secure Kubernetes Platform on GKE: Design Decisions, GitOps, and Failure Testing
A hardened GKE platform with GitOps delivery, admission policies, and measured security, scaling, and recovery tests.
Read on Hashnode (opens in a new tab)Cloud platform & security engineer · Toronto, ON
I'm Joseph. I build on Google Cloud with Terraform, Kubernetes, and Cloud Build, bringing experience in security engineering at Coinbase to the systems I design and operate.
Google Cloud certification
Verify credential01 / Selected work
Systems I've built, the decisions behind them, and the code that makes them work.
GKE · GitOps · Terraform
Staging labA private GKE platform that brings GitOps delivery, supply-chain checks, and workload security together. Infrastructure provisioned with Terraform.
Security controls
Networking · IAM · Terraform
A banking-style, four-project Google Cloud network that brings centralized governance and private service access together. Provisioned entirely with Terraform.
GKE Application Platform · measured
From the platform's evidence reports
Cloud Run · Cloud Storage · Terraform
A Terraform-managed Google Cloud platform that indexes large USDC and USDT transfers on Ethereum mainnet into Cloud Storage, and serves them through a read-only API and a static dashboard.
Security controls
System status
PausedPaused until 25 Oct 2026.
02 / Experience
Jun 2026 – Present
Stablecoin Whale Monitor · Self-employed
Feb 2025 – Jun 2026
Coinbase
Jan 2023 – Jan 2025
Independent · Code4rena, Cantina, Sherlock, Immunefi, Codehawks, QuillAudits
Oct 2023 – Apr 2024
INTMAX
Sep 2022 – Jun 2023
Astraverse
May 2022 – Sep 2022
Collect Waves
03 / Toolkit
04 / Writing
Google Cloud, infrastructure, and lessons from building and operating.
A hardened GKE platform with GitOps delivery, admission policies, and measured security, scaling, and recovery tests.
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Rebuilding the platform with Terraform, continuous processing, least-privilege CI/CD, and observability.
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A practical GCP network build with shared governance and private access between projects.
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Moving from VMs to containers, with Cloud Storage, Pub/Sub alerts, and GKE Autopilot.
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Building a stablecoin indexer on Google Cloud, starting with a VM-based deployment.
Read on Hashnode (opens in a new tab)05 / About
Before shifting to full-time cloud work, I spent four years in blockchain security and smart contract development, most recently at Coinbase, where I audited bridges, payment protocols, and network upgrades securing billions of dollars.
That experience shapes how I approach cloud architecture: minimal IAM permissions, private-by-default networking, and observability in place before the first production incident.
I'm based in Toronto, with a background in mathematics and experience helping developers understand and build on complex protocols.
DeFi Security SummitSpeaker, representing the Coinbase Security team.
Google DevFest Lagos & Africa Tech Summit NairobiProtocol education and developer onboarding.
2023–2024Let's connect
Hiring for cloud infrastructure? I'd like to hear from you.