Vasilios Syrakis

I’m a site reliability, systems, and platform engineer based in Sydney, Australia.

You might know me from a YouTube video about being laid off after eight years at Atlassian. In it, I talked through some of the systems I helped build there.

What you’ll find here

I publish technical articles and short essays here, and usually record a video to go with them. You can follow new posts through the RSS feed.

You can see what content I plan to produce in this kanban board.

My career history

My path hasn’t been exactly linear. I never finished high school, let alone university. If you’re interested in how I ended up where I am, here’s the story.

At 16, two weeks of work experience led to my first job, doing graphic design. I did that for two years before deciding it wasn’t for me, then took an IT helpdesk traineeship at ANSTO. After a year, they offered to promote me from trainee to a regular employee, doubling my pay, but I turned it down to go look for work on my own.

In hindsight, turning down the offer from ANSTO was a mistake. I worked in some roles I didn’t enjoy before ending up at Fujitsu doing helpdesk again. About half a year later, I joined a managed service provider as an associate sysadmin, managing Windows fleets on VMware and the company’s own hardware.

That MSP job was where I taught myself how to code properly. I started with PowerShell since I was working with Windows Server. I later moved on to Python, taking a free Codecademy course, and then trying to rewrite some of my PowerShell scripts. I bought a copy of Flask Web Development and started building internal tools to make my job easier. For example, I wrote a little app to manage a multi-tenant BIND DNS server. I also picked up NGINX and MySQL (setting up a marketing site for Optus at one point), and eventually went deep into Puppet, Chef, and SaltStack. Around this time, AWS was starting to look like an existential threat to the company (Cloud was new, our service was managing racks in the datacenter).

From there, I moved to Tyro Payments as a member of the operations team. I showed a particular interest in scripting and automation, so they moved me to a new DevOps team. I spent my time there using salt-cloud (which had great VMware support at the time) to fully automate machine provisioning, booting VMs and then applying Puppet manifests based on their role.

In 2018, I was poached by Atlassian to join their network edge team. Over the next eight years, I used that Flask and SaltStack background, picked up Envoy and AWS, and helped build the next iteration of Atlassian’s Global Edge, eventually migrating all company traffic behind it. It handled over 50 billion requests a day. Along the way I learned Rust, eventually deploying a couple of Rust gRPC services to production at that same scale.

In March 2026, I was laid off by Atlassian and started working at Uptick, a SaaS company in the fire-safety industry.

Work with me

I’m open to occasional advisory and contract work. If you’re dealing with a problem around Envoy, network edge, internal platforms, Python, or Rust, email me at syrakis@pm.me with some context. If I’m not the right person, I’ll tell you.

For sensitive matters that require encryption, I have PGP tools which use my public key. You can also request that I sign messages to verify they came from me and not an imposter.