About
About Anas Semesmieh
A platform engineering leader who builds teams and platforms that make change fast, safe and affordable.
Anas Semesmieh is an Engineering Manager – Platform Engineering in Sydney with 15 years across software engineering, cloud and operations. He leads the platform organisation at Pickles Auctions (SRE, cloud infrastructure and platform core), sits on the Architecture Review Board, and owns reliability, security and cost as one outcome. His path runs from IT administration in Damascus, through software and architecture roles in Kuala Lumpur, to engineering leadership in Sydney.
Outside work, he builds and documents a public homelab to stay hands-on with automation, self-hosting and recovery. He is open to Head of Platform and Head of Engineering roles.
Quick Facts
How I Lead
The principles behind the platform organisation I built from zero.
- Hire for attitude, then test with real scenarios. In interviews I play the monitoring system and let candidates ask me anything while we solve a customer-facing problem together.
- Lead as a servant. The first two engineers I hired are now my Platform Core and SRE leads, and they have been with me since.
- Report in time and money. I show progress as time saved, money saved and efficiency gained, backed by Jira and service-desk data.
- Bring the platform lens early. On the Architecture Review Board I bring the SRE, DevOps and cloud lens at design time, and again before production.
- Treat guardrails as speed. Safe defaults are what let teams, and AI, go fast without asking permission each time.
Core Expertise
His work sits between platform strategy and hands-on technical execution.
Platform Engineering and Developer Experience
Shared platform capabilities, an internal developer portal and self-service automation that give engineering teams capacity back.
SRE, Observability and Incident Response
Service level objectives per product stream, business-capability dashboards and a first-responder model that improves recovery time.
Cloud, IaC and FinOps
Azure and AWS governed as code, with cost treated as a design input rather than an afterthought.
DevSecOps and CI/CD
One source-control and delivery platform with security gates that run before merge.
AI Operations and Guardrails
Agentic workflows, an AI gateway and guardrails that let a platform team adopt AI safely.
Architecture Governance and Leadership
Architecture Review Board decisions, build-versus-buy and vendor calls, and mentoring a team that now runs itself.
Career Snapshot
A path from IT administration and software engineering into architecture and engineering leadership across three countries.
Engineering Manager - Platform Engineering at Pickles Auctions
Built the platform organisation from zero, replacing a contract DevOps function with an in-house team, and now leads SRE, cloud infrastructure and platform core across Azure and AWS.
Development Lead at CarZapp (a Pickles venture)
Led the platform rebuild across microservices, cloud-native Azure solutions and web and mobile delivery, with stronger CI/CD foundations.
Technical Consultant at NexoTech Malaysia
Freelance architecture guidance and DevOps adoption on enterprise solutions.
Solutions Architect / Senior Software Engineer at Strateq Group
Designed enterprise IoT and video-analytics solutions, led CI/CD adoption and modernised legacy systems to API-based architectures.
Earlier Software Engineering, Operations, and Training Roles
Started in IT administration and training in Damascus, then moved to Kuala Lumpur in 2014 for support, teaching and software roles at Sitecore, SelfDrvn and Nettium.
Featured Writing
Three reads: a leadership argument, a platform agent, and the hands-on homelab habits behind the work.
AI or Die
Why leadership, not technology, decides who survives the shift to AI, with receipts from three years of adoption.
Never Start From Zero
How a team-memory agent with read-only reach and a human approval gate changed platform investigations.
My Home Lab Journey: Start Here
A guided entry point into the Docker-based homelab I use to practice self-hosting, recovery drills, and automation-first operations.
Talks, Podcasts and Workshops
Public appearances on AI adoption, platform guardrails, leadership under uncertainty, and wholesale transformation.
AI or Die: AAICT AI Workshop
A talk on why leadership, not technology, decides who survives the shift to AI, and how guardrails made adoption faster.
Evolution Exchange Australia Podcast
A leadership panel on AI as augmentation, leading through uncertainty, and how platform teams help organizations move safely.
AADA Workshop: SaaS for Wholesale in Automotive
A practical workshop on evaluating SaaS for wholesale operations through process fit, integrations, digital reach, and rollout discipline.
Open Source and Public Work
Open source projects that extend Anas's platform engineering and product thinking into public, reusable work.
Homelab Repository
Documents backup workflows, restore procedures, Docker Compose services, and supporting scripts for a real self-hosted environment.
GraNazi
A local-first, privacy-compliant desktop grammar assistant — a self-hosted alternative to Grammarly built with Tauri v2 (Rust + TypeScript) and local AI via Ollama. No cloud, no subscriptions.
Connect
For engineering leadership, platform transformation, cloud architecture, or collaboration opportunities, the best way to reach Anas is via email or LinkedIn.