About

SMJED is the independent infrastructure engineering practice of Sabri MJAHED, SRE with 10+ years across sysadmin and platform engineering roles. We build on-prem, private-cloud, and hybrid platforms for teams that need full control over their infrastructure and their data — not a dependency on someone else’s cloud.

The approach

Generalists by design. Real infrastructure problems don’t stay inside one specialty. They cross observability, automation, storage, networking, and security in ways that require someone who can operate across all of them. Rack and cable on Monday, debug a Loki ingestion bottleneck on Tuesday, architect a Proxmox HA cluster on Wednesday.

That breadth comes from 10+ years across environments ranging from 4-rack datacenters to multi-DC platforms serving millions of users where data sovereignty and uptime were non-negotiable.

What we cover

• Observability: 11 TB/day across Loki, Elasticsearch, and Thanos. Grafana deployments serving 2000 users. Ingestion tuning, recording rules, SLO dashboarding, and query optimization.
• Infrastructure automation: The tooling that managed 3000+ VMs across 4 providers. Terraform multi-provider modules, Ansible dynamic inventory, GitOps pipelines from Git push to live traffic.
• On-prem virtualization: 100+ Proxmox nodes with PXE automation. Production experience across ZFS, NFS, SAN, NVMe-oF, and Ceph. vSphere migrations, HA cluster design.
• Networking & security: F5 DDoS mitigation, distributed firewalling across 1000+ VMs, Cisco/Juniper network hardware, ExtraHop NDR, vulnerability management.
• Sovereign AI: GPU deployments running vLLM, private RAG pipelines, and RBAC-aware SRE assistants that run entirely on your own infrastructure. No external API dependency for sensitive workflows.
• Databases & messaging: PostgreSQL HA (Patroni/etcd), Couchbase at scale, Kafka pipelines, Elasticsearch clusters.

How we work

SMJED integrates directly into your team. No black-box consulting, no throwing reports over the wall. We scope properly before starting, validate decisions through real testing, and document everything we touch so your team can operate it after we leave.

For engagements that need more capacity, vetted freelancers from the SMJED network join the mission. One point of contact, scalable delivery.

Background

Founded by Sabri MJAHED — SRE with 10 years across sysadmin roles (VINC) and high-stakes platform engineering. Started hands-on with physical infrastructure, moved into automation, observability, and AI-assisted operations. Each layer built on operational pain felt at the previous one.

More on the Open Source page and the Missions page.