Cédric Merlin

At a glance

• Infrastructure for platforms handling 750 million requests a day.
• Hotel booking platforms for the Rugby World Cup 2023 and the Paris 2024 Olympics.
• Led a team of 6, supported 240 users in 5 countries, managed the IT budget.
• ISO 27001, ISO 27005 and PCI DSS compliance.
• Founder of M-KIS (managed IT services, cloud, DevSecOps, Odoo, AI), France, Togo, Benin.

Skills

Cloud

AWS, OVH, Scaleway, private cloud

Containers and orchestration

Kubernetes (CKA), Docker, ArgoCD, Proxmox VE, ESXi, Xen

Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD

Ansible, Terraform, GitHub Actions, Jenkins

Networking and Zero Trust

VPN, SSO, Zero Trust (Cloudflare Tunnel, Access and WAF, WireGuard / NetBird), certificate-based bastions

Web and load balancing

Nginx, HAProxy, Traefik, Varnish, Apache, Node.js

Data

PostgreSQL, MySQL / MariaDB, MongoDB, Redis, Kafka, Qdrant

Observability

Prometheus, Loki, Grafana, Langfuse, SaaS monitoring

Security

Web and infrastructure penetration testing, vulnerability research, Wazuh SOC, LLM security

AI in production

LLMs, agents and MCP servers, RAG, n8n, Whisper, voice agents (SIP / RTP)

Development

Python, Bash, PowerShell, TypeScript (Next.js, Astro), Supabase, Odoo 18

Career

1. Since 2018

   Infrastructure for an international B2B SaaS platform

   • Ran the cloud environments, dedicated servers, Docker and Kubernetes clusters behind critical platforms (up to 750M requests a day).
   • Infrastructure for the hotel booking platforms of the Rugby World Cup 2023 and the Paris 2024 Olympics.
   • Split a monolith into containerised microservices.
   • Infrastructure bot for the teams: an LLM connected read-only to the infrastructure, per-user audit, every question traced.
   • Led ISO 27001 / 27005 and PCI DSS compliance. Managed a team of 6 and the IT budget.

2. 2017 – 2018

   Systems and security engineer

   • Redundant, high-availability infrastructure of about 50 servers.
   • Firewalls and site-to-site VPN (IPsec StrongSwan).
   • Migration of Active Directory and Google to Azure, with centralised identities. 150 users, a team of 3 technicians.

3. 2015 – 2017

   System administrator, public sector

   • Systems administration and level 3 support.
   • PowerShell automation, documentation of procedures and security policies.
   • French Confidentiel Défense security clearance.

4. Since 2014

   Founder of M-KIS

   • Managed IT services, cloud, DevSecOps, Odoo integration, penetration testing, DevOps / Kubernetes / security training.
   • In-house SaaS products: Kadens (gym management, in production), SafePrompt (browser extension that stops data leaking into AI tools, published on Chrome and Firefox), Merlya (AI-assisted quote preparation for industrial SMEs), Analya (company financial analysis by SIREN number).
   • CTO of a startup: sovereign infrastructure with zero inbound ports, fully described in Ansible.