Luka Kladarić

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.