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Nikola Simić

Resume

Table of Contents

Summary

Nikola Simić

I'm a DevOps engineer coming from a software engineering background, with about three years of experience across cloud, automation and application development. I design and run infrastructure for production systems, specializing in AWS, from infrastructure as code and serverless architecture to CI/CD, monitoring and security. I aim to understand the systems I work on in depth, because that lets me adjust and optimize them to get the most out of the resources available. A big part of the job is communication, and I'm comfortable discussing both technical and non-technical decisions with clients, managers and other engineers.

Certifications

AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer Associate AWS Certified Developer Associate AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner

Experience

  1. DevOps Engineer

    Mar 2026 - Present

    TIAC d.o.o, Novi Sad, Serbia

    Velexfarm · Pharmaceutical B2B platform

    • Designed and implemented optimized delivery methods between multiple development environments.
    • Designed and implemented the infrastructure on Azure using Terraform.
    • Optimized cloud costs across the deployed infrastructure.
    • Reduced deployment time with custom caching layers for Azure DevOps pipelines.

    • Azure
    • Azure DevOps
    • Terraform

  2. DevOps Engineer

    Mar 2025 - Present

    TIAC d.o.o, Novi Sad, Serbia

    Attain Apps · BI for higher education institutions

    • Managing infrastructure as code with AWS CDK, redesigned into a less coupled multi-stack approach.
    • Managing serverless workloads: AWS Lambda, ECS Fargate, S3, DynamoDB and RDS Aurora.
    • Optimizing application performance and infrastructure costs by matching the infrastructure to the processing use case.
    • Building a custom monitoring dashboard with Grafana Cloud.
    • Maintaining IAM roles and permissions following the least-privilege principle.
    • Designing the VPC structure for better availability and redundancy, and designing backup and recovery strategies.
    • Improving the HECVAT score through infrastructure and security work.
    • Managing CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions.

    • AWS
    • AWS CDK
    • Lambda
    • ECS Fargate
    • DynamoDB
    • Aurora
    • Cognito
    • Bedrock
    • CloudWatch
    • Grafana
    • GitHub Actions
    • TypeScript

  3. DevOps & Software Engineer

    Mar 2024 - Sep 2025

    TIAC d.o.o, Novi Sad, Serbia

    Attain FED · US Federal Student Aid

    • Ported a legacy .NET Framework desktop application to .NET Core and Angular, improving stability and security and designing new features along the way.
    • Managed deployments to Windows Server VMs running IIS, using GitHub Actions and custom PowerShell deployment scripts.
    • Built file-based integrations with multiple external systems, including background processes for inbound and outbound files.
    • Designed an improved authentication flow using refresh tokens for a better user experience.

    • .NET
    • Angular
    • GitHub Actions
    • PowerShell
    • Windows Server
    • IIS
    • MS SQL Server
    • Jira

  4. Software Engineer

    Dec 2023 - Mar 2024

    TIAC d.o.o, Novi Sad, Serbia

    US Visa · Visa automation platform and services

    • Application development and delivery.

  5. DevOps & Software Engineer

    Contractor 2023 & 2025

    Ingel Agro, Novi Sad, Serbia

    Remote control and data aggregation of automated agro-cultural machines

    • Improved communication performance of an existing IoT setup by more than 50% by designing and developing a solution that uses a protocol better suited to the use case.
    • Set up a Debian-based VPS on Hetzner with an MQTT broker and a WireGuard VPN, serving as a central point through which remote nodes send data and receive commands.

    • Node.js
    • Node-RED
    • MQTT
    • WireGuard
    • Hetzner
    • Linux

Education

  1. Master's degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Pursuing

    Faculty of Technical Sciences, University of Novi Sad, Serbia

    Expected graduation: Winter 2026

  2. Bachelor's degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering

    2020-2024

    Faculty of Technical Sciences, University of Novi Sad, Serbia

    Graduated on the Applied Computer Sciences and Informatics submodule with the GPA 9.29/10.0
    Bachelor thesis: Bypassing network restrictions using ICMP tunneling

    This thesis describes the implementation of a software solution that allows a user to bypass restrictions defined on the network their computer is connected to. This is possible due to the ICMP tunneling method that encapsulates the client's network traffic into ICMP packets, which are allowed by default on most networks because ICMP is meant for network diagnostics. ICMP packets are routed to the server which can unpack the original packet and forward it to its destination. The response is encapsulated into an ICMP packet by the server and sent back to the client, which unpacks it and receives the original response.