Sergei Iakovlev

Summary

Principal SRE and tech lead of the Ethereum unit at P2P.org. Responsible for the reliability of 32,000+ mainnet validators (1.1M+ ETH) on bare-metal Kubernetes: 99.998% attestation participation, zero slashing on threshold-signed validators, #1 Lido operator by performance on Rated Network. Managed a team of up to four SREs as SRE manager in 2024–2026. 15 years in infrastructure: data-center networks first, Kubernetes platforms since 2019.

Experience

Principal SRE Engineer, Tech Lead · P2P.org 2026-02 – now

Non-custodial staking provider, #1 Lido operator by performance on Rated Network · Remote

Tech lead of the Ethereum unit: reliability, security and technical direction.

• Own the reliability of 32,000+ active mainnet validators (1.1M+ ETH) with zero slashing on threshold-signed validators: Vouch with 2-of-3 Dirk signing, distributed validators on SSV and Obol, 63 node pairs across four European regions.
• Keep the fleet at the top of the field: 99.998% attestation participation and 99.57% correct head votes against 98.7% for the network (Jul–Oct 2026). On Rated Network as of October 2026: #1 Lido operator over 7 and 30 days, #1 of all operators network-wide over 30 days and #3 over 7 days.
• Run five execution and four consensus clients in many different pairings, so a single client bug cannot take the fleet down.
• Own the Kubernetes reference architecture and security baseline used across all teams, agreed through RFCs; act as the technology advisor and technical interviewer for every engineering team.
• Lead DevSecOps practice: keyless cosign signatures and SLSA provenance for every image, binary and deployment artifact; SHA-pinned, audited CI workflows; reproducible builds with Nix.
• Write the unit’s services in Rust: validator inventory, exits via threshold BLS and Safe role policies, Lido reward claims with safety checks.
• Built network analytics on Xatu, Kafka and ClickHouse, and exposed it and Grafana to LLM agents over MCP, now used company-wide.

SRE Manager (Senior → Principal) · P2P.org 2024-06 – 2026-02

Led the Ethereum SRE team of up to four engineers, staying hands-on.

• Ran the team: hiring, 1:1s, growth plans and performance reviews.
• Organised on-call and incident management for the unit: rotations, escalation, P1–P5 severities by network; ran blameless postmortems with tracked action items.
• Built the reliability model: about 60 alert rules with severity by network, missed-duty detection from ClickHouse, daily reports on attestation correctness (rated.network methodology) and APR against Lido peers.

DevOps Engineer · P2P.org 2021-07 – 2024-06

Moved the Ethereum infrastructure off cloud VMs onto company-owned bare metal.

• Launched the company’s first bare-metal Kubernetes cluster and grew it into the internal platform used by every team. Moving workloads off cloud VMs cut infrastructure cost by more than 70%.
• Designed the delivery model for Ethereum workloads: CUE and Nix, Crossplane and Terraform on bare metal and three clouds, ArgoCD from OCI.
• Designed disaster recovery for signing: 2-of-3 Dirk threshold across three regions with slashing-protection databases, and wallet stores replicated to versioned, KMS-encrypted object storage in a separate cloud.

Senior DevOps Engineer · SoftPro 2019-09 – 2021-07

Software company · Moscow, Russia

• Led the move from VMs with apt packages and docker-compose to bare-metal Kubernetes: 7+ clusters of about 30 nodes across several data centers.
• Introduced infrastructure as code, CI/CD and observability as standard practice, wrote internal Terraform providers; cut deploy time from 40 minutes to 4.

Network Architect, Team Lead · HOST 2011-04 – 2019-09

IT integrator · Perm, Russia · Network Engineer (2011) → Senior (2014) → Architect, Team Lead (2017)

• Led the network engineering group: staffing across projects, workload planning, training; owned pre-sales for the group, including its budget.
• Designed multi-DC infrastructure for a bank (150+ servers, 1,000+ VMs) and replaced two data centers’ network for Russia’s largest reseller with no maintenance window over one hour.

Skills

Ethereum

Geth, Nethermind, Besu, Reth, Lighthouse, Prysm, Teku, Nimbus; Vouch, Dirk, SSV, Obol; commit-boost (MEV-Boost); Lido, StakeWise

Platform

Kubernetes on bare metal and in the cloud, Talos, Cilium, ArgoCD

IaC

Nix, CUE, Terraform, Crossplane

Observability

Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics, Grafana, Loki, Tempo, OpenTelemetry, Alertmanager

Data

ClickHouse, Kafka, PostgreSQL

Security

HCP Vault, SLSA, Tailscale, CI hardening

Programming

Rust, Go, Python

Education

Computer Security, 5.5-year specialist degree · Perm State University 2006 – 2012

Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics · Perm, Russia

Other

At work

900+ merged PRs in 21 repositories and ~1,800 reviews over the last year

Open source

Maintainer of ethereum.nix; 130+ merged PRs to 22 projects since 2018 (Lighthouse, Dirk, Commit-Boost, Lido, nixpkgs); author of dkc and netdev

Certifications

CKA (2021); Cisco CCSP, Check Point CCSE, Palo Alto ACE, Huawei HCNA

Languages

Russian (native), English (professional working proficiency)