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Fellow engineer

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Achref Loussaief

Cloud and infrastructure engineer, building secure foundations for large companies.
Cloud and infrastructure engineer: AWS, Terraform, network security, automation.

Achref is a cloud and infrastructure engineer, trained at Télécom SudParis in Paris and at SupCom in Tunis. He spent a year in the service center of a CAC 40 shipping group, working on the cloud accounts and networks it relies on every day.

He sets up secure cloud environments, writes the code that builds them the same way every time, and automates network tasks that used to be done by hand.

Cloud and infrastructure engineer on critical AWS environments: landing zones, Transit Gateway, Palo Alto firewalls managed from Panorama, backup automation on Lambda.

Infrastructure as Code with Terraform and Terragrunt, network automation with Python and Ansible, IPAM on NetBox. Looking at cloud engineering, infrastructure and SRE roles.

Work so far

  • Sep 2025 – Sep 2026

    Cloud & network engineer, apprenticeship, CNS Communications

    CNS Communications, CMA-CGM Service Center · Paris

    Built a secure test version of the company’s AWS cloud, with its own network and firewalls, and automated the backups. Manual set-up work dropped by 60%.

    Looked after more than ten firewalls across AWS and Google Cloud, and automated how thousands of network addresses are handed out.

    Landing zone
    Secure pre-production AWS landing zone (8 VPCs): VPC, Transit Gateway, Palo Alto firewalls and Panorama, backups automated with Lambda. Manual provisioning down 60%.
    Firewalls
    10+ firewalls onboarded and administered in Panorama; security policies deployed and maintained across the fleet, in AWS and GCP.
    IaC
    Reusable Terraform modules deployed hundreds of times, industrialised with Terragrunt: dev, preprod and prod standardised, less configuration drift.
    IPAM & DHCP
    NetBox on AWS (Docker) with SSO and custom plugins as the IPAM source of truth. DHCP for several thousand addresses automated: Python, EfficientIP sync through Semaphore and Ansible.
    Also
    F5 configuration as code (virtual servers, iRules). Contributed to a network automation audit of the Thales LAN.
    Stack
    AWS, GCP, Terraform, Terragrunt, Ansible, Python, Palo Alto, Panorama, NetBox, EfficientIP, F5, GitLab CI/CD.
  • Jun – Aug 2025

    Cloud engineer intern, Télécom SudParis Lab

    Télécom SudParis Lab · Évry

    Built a tool that lets an engineer describe an application in a short file and get the full cloud set-up generated from it.

    Added a checker that catches configuration mistakes before anything reaches AWS.

    Tool
    IaC abstraction: a short YAML template describes the application, the tool generates the AWS infrastructure with Terraform.
    Validator
    Python pre-deployment validator, inspired by TFLint, checking compliance and cloud best practices in CI.
    Stack
    Python, Terraform, YAML, CI.

Stack

Cloud & infra
AWS (VPC · Transit Gateway · Lambda · Route 53 · DynamoDB · EC2 · Secrets Manager) · GCP
IaC & automation
Terraform · Terragrunt · Ansible · Python · Semaphore · GitLab CI/CD
Network security
Palo Alto NGFW · Panorama · SSO/SAML · Zero Trust
Networking & IPAM
DNS · DHCP · IPAM · NetBox · EfficientIP · cloud routing
Containers
Docker · Kubernetes · Helm
Observability
ThousandEyes · Grafana · Prometheus

Projects

  • Project

    Microservices on Kubernetes

    Moved a single large application into small containerised services and ran them on a Kubernetes cluster built on local virtual machines, with updates that do not interrupt the service.

    Migration
    Monolith split into Docker microservices.
    Cluster
    Local Kubernetes cluster on Vagrant VMs.
    Deploy
    Manifests and Helm charts (Deployments, Services, ConfigMaps, Secrets), rolling updates, liveness and readiness probes.

Certifications

  • AWSCertified Cloud Practitioner
  • CiscoCCNA
  • Linux FoundationCertified Kubernetes Administrator (expected 2026)

Languages

  • Frenchbilingual
  • EnglishC2
  • Arabicnative

Education

  • Sep 2024 – Aug 2026

    Télécom SudParis, Institut Polytechnique de Paris

    Dual engineering degree, specialisation in network architecture and intelligence (AIR). Évry.

    Degree
    Dual engineering degree, specialisation Network Architecture and Intelligence (AIR).
  • Sep 2022 – Aug 2024

    SupCom, Higher School of Communications of Tunis

    Computer networks and telecommunications. Tunis.

    Programme
    Computer networks and telecommunications.