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Kareem Talbert

Ascending through the cloud layer

ALT 2,000 ft

KT
KT · PLATFORM · KT · PLATFORM · KT

Senior Platform Engineer — New York

Kareem Talbert, Senior Cloud & AI Platform Engineer: I architect the cloudteams ship on.

I design self-service cloud platforms, landing zones and AI agent architectures — the blueprints that take teams from tickets to production.

Dive inScroll to descend

01Request

Every platform starts as a ticket.

A database needed by Friday. A VM someone clicked together by hand. Environments that drift a little more every sprint.

02Code

So I design it as code.

Every platform starts as a blueprint. I redesigned legacy Terraform-wrapped-in-Go tooling around clean, composable Bicep modules that anyone can read and review.

Mastercard — Bicep + Azure DevOps

03Land

It lands in secure zones.

I architect Azure Landing Zones that give every team a standard, governed home for Redis, PostgreSQL, AKS and more — guardrails designed in, not bolted on.

Mastercard — Cloud as a Service

04Ship

Shipped by pipelines, not people.

I design the delivery system — CI/CD and event-driven configuration — so teams move from manual deploys to workflows that run, check and heal themselves.

U.S. Bank — SaltStack automation

05Agents

Now the platform thinks.

I design AI agent systems and the orchestration around them — planners, provisioners and reviewers that pick up the toil, check each other's work and hand off to a human when it matters.

06Scale

And it runs at enterprise scale.

Fifteen years of designing infrastructure that is quieter, safer and faster for the teams that depend on it.

INC-4021ETA 3 weeks

Need a Postgres DB for checkout

REQ-1187Blocked

Prod and staging don't match again

REQ-2290Sev 2

Manual deploy failed at 2 a.m.

INC-3315Unassigned

Who owns this VM?

REQ-0954Waiting

Firewall rule for new service

Landing zone · payments-prod

Hub

Firewall · Policy

AKS
Redis
PostgreSQL
Key Vault
App Service
main.bicep
 1module zone 'landing-zone.bicep' = { 2  name: 'payments-prod' 3  params: { 4    region: 'eastus2' 5    services: [ 'aks', 'redis', 'postgres' ] 6    policy: 'pci-baseline' 7  } 8}
  1. ✓1Commit
  2. ✓2Validate
  3. ✓3What-if
  4. ✓4Deploy
  5. ✓5Observe

✓ bicep lint — 0 warnings

✓ what-if — 3 to create

✓ deployed to eastus2

✓ salt highstate — 0 failed

Orchestrator

Planner

✓

Breaks the request down

Plan: Redis for payments-prod

Provisioner

✓

Writes & applies IaC

3 resources via Bicep

Reviewer

✓

Checks policy & cost

pci-baseline ✓ · +$212/mo

Observer

✓

Watches what shipped

p99 latency healthy

0+

Years in infrastructure

0

Cloud certifications

0

Clouds — Azure, AWS, OCI

0

Organisations served

About

Hi, I'm Kareem.

For fifteen years I've been designing the platforms other teams build on — turning tangled, ticket-driven infrastructure into clear architectures with self-service, security and compliance designed in from the start. I spend as much time at the whiteboard as in the code, shaping landing zones, platform blueprints and AI agent systems so developers can ship instead of wait.

Get in touchLinkedIn ↗

Quick facts

Based in
New York City
Currently
Senior Platform Engineer, Mastercard
Focus
Cloud & AI architecture, platform design
Studying
B.S. Artificial Intelligence, Indiana University Indianapolis
Author
Hello, World! — AI and society (2023)
Clouds
Azure · AWS · Oracle Cloud

“From the server room to the cloud.”

Certified — 8 credentials

4× Azure · 3× OCI · 1× AWS

  • Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert badge

    Azure Solutions Architect

    Microsoft · AZ-305

  • Microsoft Certified: DevOps Engineer Expert badge

    DevOps Engineer

    Microsoft · AZ-400

  • Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate badge

    Azure Administrator

    Microsoft · AZ-104

  • Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Fundamentals Fundamentals badge

    Azure AI Fundamentals

    Microsoft · AI-900

  • Oracle certified

    OCI Architect

    Associate

    OCI Architect

    Oracle · 1Z0-1072

  • Oracle certified

    OCI AI Foundations

    Associate

    OCI AI Foundations

    Oracle · 1Z0-1122

  • Oracle certified

    OCI Foundations

    Associate

    OCI Foundations

    Oracle · 1Z0-1085

  • AWS Certified: Cloud Practitioner Foundational badge

    Cloud Practitioner

    AWS · CLF-C02

From the server room to the cloud.

Ground level

2014 — 17

Greystone Programs logoGreystone ProgramsIT Coordinator

End-user and server support across 18 healthcare locations.

2014 — 17: IT Coordinator at Greystone Programs

  1. 2014 — 17 — IT Coordinator, Greystone Programs. End-user and server support across 18 healthcare locations.
  2. 2016 — 17 — NOC Engineer, CyrusOne. Monitoring enterprise infrastructure; racks, fibre and VMware.
  3. 2017 — 18 — Systems Engineer, White Plains Hospital. Keeping rapidly growing hospital infrastructure available and secure.
  4. 2018 — 20 — Sr. Installations Engineer, Varian Medical Systems. Radiation-oncology system migrations across the Northeast.
  5. 2020 — 22 — DevOps Systems Administrator, Kapsch TrafficCom. Azure and on-prem backbone for tolling and traffic systems, automated with Ansible and Bicep.
  6. 2022 — 24 — Infrastructure Automation Engineer, U.S. Bank. SaltStack states, beacons and reactors; migrating teams off Puppet and manual deploys.
  7. 2024 — now — Senior Platform Engineer, Mastercard. Designing global-scale Azure platform capabilities that deliver Cloud as a Service.

Things I’ve designed& written.

Outside the day job: two AI-powered iPhone apps, and a book on what AI means for everyone else.

Designed & built

iPhone · App Store

Recurra AI

Every subscription. One glance.

An iPhone subscription tracker that never asks for your bank login. It warns you before every charge, and Remi — an on-device AI money mentor — reviews your spending each month and tells you what to cut.

  • 100% on-device — no accounts, no bank links
  • Remi, an AI money mentor
  • Renewal alerts & trial countdowns
App Store ↗recurraai.com ↗
Recurra

This month

$0.00

  • SStreamingRenews in 2 days$15.49
  • MMusicRenews Oct 18$10.99
  • CCloud storageRenews Oct 21$2.99
  • FFitnessTrial ends in 5 days$24.99

Remi suggests

You pay for two music services. Cancelling one saves $131.88 a year.

NuriToday

What's on today? Text Sarah I'll be 10 min late, add my weekly groceries to Instacart, and get me an Uber to the airport at 5.

  • CCalendar3 meetings · first at 10:30
  • MMessagesTo Sarah: “Running 10 min late”Approve✓ Done
  • InstacartWeekly cart · 12 items · $86.40Approve✓ Done
  • UberRide to the airport at 5:00 PMApprove✓ Done

4 tasks · 1 sentence · all approved

Designed & built

iPhone · coming soon

Waitlist open

Nuri: Personal Assistant

Doesn't just talk. Gets it done.

Works with

  • UberRequest rides
  • InstacartBuild grocery carts
  • + Calendar, Reminders, Messages, Mail, Maps & more

An AI personal assistant for iPhone. Ask in one sentence and Nuri books your Uber, fills your Instacart cart, manages your calendar and sends messages — and nothing happens until you approve it.

  • Real errands, not just answers — Uber rides and Instacart carts from one sentence
  • Every action is shown for review and approved before it runs
  • Model-agnostic (OpenAI, Anthropic) with MCP for new integrations; keys in Keychain
Join the waitlist ↗getnuri.io ↗
Cover of Hello, World! The Mind-Blowing Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Society by Kareem Talbert

Author · Second edition · 2023

Hello, World!

The Mind-Blowing Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Society

A plain-language guide to how AI is already reshaping the things that matter most — your job, your health, your money and your kids' future — and how to stay ahead of it.

Format
Paperback
Length
82 pages
Published
2023
Get it on Amazon ↗

The periodic tableof my stack.

23 elements in 6 families. Hover a tile to read it, or pick a family to light it up.

ContactOpen to conversations

Let's designwhat's next.

Say hello

Best way to reach me

Message me on LinkedIn ↗