Press Kit
Bios at five lengths. Photos at multiple resolutions. Use what fits.
If you need anything else, book a call or email luka@chaos.guru.
At a glance
Name: Luka Kladarić
Tagline: Find it. Fix it. Hand it back.
What I do: Independent cloud infrastructure consultant, engineering coach, conference speaker.
Based: Croatia. Working remotely worldwide.
Languages: English, Croatian.
Writing: chaosguru.substack.com
Booking: schedule.chaos.guru/lets-meet
Email: luka@chaos.guru
Bios
One-liner (15 words)
Luka Kladarić, independent cloud infrastructure consultant and engineering coach. 20 years untangling production systems.
Short (~50 words)
Luka Kladarić, 20 years in cloud infrastructure. Past CTO at Hitlist, infra leadership at Noom (45M+ users), platform work at Meetup and deviantART. Writes engineering essays with strong opinions at chaosguru.substack.com. Available for fractional CTO, architecture review, and platform/SRE work.
Medium (~110 words)
Luka Kladarić, 20 years in cloud infrastructure. Was CTO at Hitlist. Ran infra at Noom through the scale-up to 45M+ users (and the HIPAA work that came with it). Before that, platform and SRE at Meetup and deviantART. AWS-shaped career, mostly. Writes engineering essays with strong opinions at chaosguru.substack.com. Speaks at conferences regularly; recent keynote on AI and open source governance.
Available for advisory and contract work: fractional CTO, architecture reviews, platform and SRE buildouts, founder mentorship, AWS cost and ops debt cleanup. Best fit for companies whose first infra decisions have stopped scaling.
Long (~250 words), for conference programs and publications
Luka Kladarić has spent 20 years in cloud infrastructure, mostly fixing systems that grew faster than their architecture. He was CTO at Hitlist, where he owned a Python/Django/Postgres backend crawling tens of millions of flights daily. Before that he led infrastructure at Noom for nearly a decade, scaling the platform from 60 bare-metal servers at Rackspace to a HIPAA- and SOC2-compliant container platform on AWS serving 45M+ users, with documented ownership and no single points of failure. Earlier in his career he did engineering and platform work at Meetup, deviantART, and several growth-stage companies across the AWS-native stack.
His specialty is distributed system failures: the kind where five things go wrong at once and none of them are the root cause. He untangles those quickly, then figures out how to make sure they don’t happen again.
Luka writes engineering essays with strong opinions at chaosguru.substack.com about infrastructure, security, and the organizational dysfunction that makes both harder than they need to be. He’s a regular conference speaker (recent keynote: AI’s impact on open source governance) and his talks have covered chaos engineering, platform decay, application security, and running infrastructure at scale.
Today he works through Chaos Guru, his independent consulting practice, available for advisory and contract engagements: fractional CTO, architecture reviews, platform and SRE buildouts, founder mentorship, AWS cost and ops debt cleanup.
First-person (~110 words)
I’ve been doing cloud infrastructure for 20 years. Past CTO at Hitlist, infra leadership at Noom (45M+ users, HIPAA-grade compliance), and platform work at Meetup and deviantART. I write engineering essays with strong opinions at chaosguru.substack.com.
I’m available for advisory and contract work: fractional CTO, architecture reviews, platform and SRE buildouts, founder mentorship, AWS cost and ops debt cleanup. Best fit for companies past their first product-market fit that have outgrown their initial infra decisions and want senior judgment without committing to a full-time hire.
chaos.guru · luka@chaos.guru · schedule.chaos.guru/lets-meet
Photos
Usage: Free to use for editorial coverage, conference programs, podcast art, social posts about my work. Please credit “Luka Kladarić” or “Chaos Guru” where appropriate. No need to ask first.
Speaking topics
I speak on:
Distributed system failures and how to design around them
Cloud infrastructure cost and ops debt
Platform engineering and the realities of internal developer platforms
Application security from the ops side (HSTS, CSP, TLS, modern threat models)
The organizational dysfunction that produces tech debt
AI’s impact on open source governance and maintainership
Chaos engineering and resilience testing in production
For a current list of confirmed engagements and past talks: chaosguru.substack.com/p/speaking
Selected writing
The AI field guide for people with real jobs — a no-hype walkthrough of LLMs, agents, and vibe coding for everyone who missed the memo
Stop trying to fail over from Cloudflare — what walking away from Cloudflare actually costs
License Laundering and the Death of Clean Room — on chardet, AI rewrites, and licensing brittleness (ShiftMag)
Full archive: chaosguru.substack.com/archive
Selected talks
Booking
Speaking, advisory, consulting, coaching: schedule.chaos.guru/lets-meet
Press / interview / podcast inquiries: luka@chaos.guru (mention what it’s for in the subject)
Substack DMs: open