About me

Matt Mercan

Matt Mercan

Principal DevOps Engineer based in Melbourne, Australia, currently at Bupa Australia where I focus on cloud infrastructure, CI/CD automation, and helping engineering teams ship faster and more safely. My roots are in software development — analysis, construction, and working close to the code — and that background still shapes how I think about DevOps. I don't just operate infrastructure; I understand what the developers on the other side of the pipeline are dealing with. I go by Matt, though my full name is Murat Mercan — you'll find me as mmercan on GitHub.

Guiding Principle

"Automation is to DevOps as a telescope is to astronomy."

Core Focus Areas

  • Cloud Infrastructure Designing and operating Azure-based infrastructure including AKS, Azure DevOps, Azure AD, and App Services. Making the messy parts of cloud delivery reliable, observable, and repeatable.
  • CI/CD Pipelines Building, optimising, and rescuing pipelines across Azure Pipelines and GitHub Actions. I have a strong belief that automation is not optional — it's the foundation everything else is built on.
  • Kubernetes & Containers Container orchestration, health monitoring, and security posture across Kubernetes clusters. Docker from development through to production.
  • Software Development .NET Core applications and services, with a strong background in C#, PowerShell, TypeScript, and Angular. Developer tooling and CLI workflows that make teams faster.

Positions

  • Principal DevOps Engineer

    Bupa Australia, Melbourne — present

    Leading cloud infrastructure strategy and CI/CD automation across engineering teams. Focused on Azure-native solutions, Kubernetes workloads, and building the tooling and processes that let developers ship with confidence. Bringing a software engineering mindset to infrastructure problems.

  • Senior Software Developer

    Datacom

    Software delivery across enterprise projects, working on complex systems with a focus on quality, maintainability, and delivery velocity.

  • Senior Developer & Trainer

    Fast Lane Australia

    Technical training and hands-on development. Translating complex engineering concepts into practical skills for developer audiences.

  • Senior Developer & Development Manager

    Ad-cs

    Software development and team management for hospitality software systems. Wore both the engineering and leadership hats, often simultaneously.

  • RIS/PACS Software Developer

    Eroglu Software

    Developed Radiology Information Systems and Picture Archiving and Communication Systems for hospital environments — where software reliability is not optional.

Side Projects

  • Sentinel A multi-service .NET Core project exploring health monitoring, containerised with Docker and built with proper CI/CD from the ground up. My main sandbox for trying new ideas at the intersection of software and infrastructure.
  • actions-set-secret A GitHub Actions utility for creating and updating repository secrets programmatically. Small tool, real problem solved.
  • Azure Site Extensions Exploring Azure App Service site extensions with ASP.NET Core — useful for anyone who has ever needed to extend the App Service environment without full infrastructure control.

GitHub Arctic Code Vault Contributor — apparently some of my code will outlast us all. 47+ repositories spanning DevOps tooling, web experiments, and hardware tinkering at github.com/mmercan.

Beyond the Terminal

  • Electronics & AOT Getting hands-on with electronics — from low-level circuit design to embedded systems and microcontrollers. There's a different kind of satisfaction in working at this layer of the stack, where a wrong value in a config doesn't just crash a service, it lets out the magic smoke. AOT (Ahead-of-Time) compiled environments and bare-metal thinking appeal for the same reason: understanding what's really happening underneath.
  • Home Automation My home runs on Home Assistant, and my go-to hardware platform is the ESP32 with ESPHome. The kind of home automation where you're flashing firmware, wiring up servo motors, and calibrating configs at 11pm — because a system you built yourself is worth the extra hour. There's something deeply satisfying about software you wrote talking to hardware you wired up.
  • Machine Learning Actively interested in how models are built, trained, and deployed — and increasingly how ML fits into real engineering systems. The intersection of ML and infrastructure (model serving, pipelines, and edge inference on devices like the ESP32) is a particularly interesting space.

Writing

I occasionally write about things I've figured out the hard way at mercan.io — tagline: debugging ideas. Topics include Azure DevOps pipelines, .NET Core, Azure AD authentication, Kubernetes, SonarQube, and anything else that cost me a few hours I'd rather someone else not have to spend.

CV

For a full curriculum vitae, see my LinkedIn profile.

LinkedIn

Contact

Collaboration, infrastructure questions, home automation war stories, and general engineering discussions are welcome via e-mail or LinkedIn. Specific questions get specific answers. Generic partnership pitches are composted efficiently.

© 2026 Matt Mercan