Hi, my name is Kevin Diaz and I currently work as a Systems Engineer at Yext. I am the tech lead of the Infrastructure Operations team. My focus over the last few years has been transforming complex, fragmented environments into automated, self-service ecosystems. I bridge the gap between legacy reliability and modern cloud agility, ensuring our foundations are as stable as they are scalable. I aim to reduce friction both inside the infrastructure team and between the infrastructure and product engineering teams. Whether I’m architecting standardized account vending machines through AWS Control Tower and GCP Project Factory or implementing the company’s first production EKS architecture, I am a firm believer that infrastructure should be treated as a product. From refactoring core Ansible and Terraform modules to bootstrapping bare-metal machines with custom Bash/PXE workflows, I focus on creating "Golden Paths" that allow others to move faster without worrying about the underlying plumbing.
While at work, I seek cloud-native solutions and scalability, in my off-time I look at the low level details of how systems work at their core. I have spent time understanding the Linux kernel internals and putting those learnings into practice with my study of embedded systems. I have spent plenty of time writing C and C++ as part of this and earlier endeavors. Just for fun, I once forked Consul and go-discover just to add libvirt support for auto discovery of cluster members. If a tool seems like magic to me, I will usually dive into the source code or pick up a book on the subject until I’ve demystified it. Understanding how everything works helps me be a better engineer at work and simultaneously fulfills that itch to learn.
Outside of all of that, I enjoy playing in my local dart league, rock climbing, and sailing. Fun fact, I am American Sailing Association (ASA) certified to skipper a 42 foot sail boat.