Platform Engineers in Germany

• Error analysis and fixes including performance optimization of the in-house developed platform API
• Change and incident management in day-to-day operations
• Responsible for compliance with security and compliance requirements
• Vendor management for software development and maintenance
• Planning and execution of migration of legacy services to a cloud native platform

Role in the project: project staff, implementation team

Used skills: requirements analysis, IT service and application management, IT operations, error analysis and performance optimization, software maintenance and lifecycle management

Project environment: Cloud Native Platform (Kubernetes, Crossplane, AWS, ArgoCD, Grafana)

maturing their API Practices on both, a Business and Technology level. My role encompasses strategy, architecture, developer advocacy as well as hands on software engineering, enabling both technical teams and business leadership to adopt and act on API- centric principles effectively. Coincidentally, we also establish GitOps, DX and Platform Best practices with this project.

Highlights:

• Aligning executives with the initiative by clarifying strategy, replacing misconceptions and myths with facts, clarifying the value of existing assets and enabling informed decision-making
• Formulating a way forward for API Lifecycle Management at OTTO
• Driving platform progress and fostering developer engagement by hands-on engineering work towards strategic goals

API Lifecycle Management, Team Topologies, Organizational Evolution, Regulatory, Platform Advocate, Developer Platform, Communities of Practice, Terraform, Kotlin, Kafka, Kong, WSO2, Apigee, Gravitee, Backstage, AsyncAPI, OpenAPI, API Design, AWS, react, nodejs, typescript, redocly, reactive programming, CDC, golang, gingonic, GitOps, DX (developer experience), stakeholder management, roadmaps, workshops, discovery.

Manufacturing intelligence platform with enterprise workflows, RAG, real-time AI assistant features, and multi-repository backend architecture.

• Built and extended production AI/backend services with Django, DRF, FastAPI, GraphQL, Celery, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, and WebSockets across a modular multi-repository platform.
• Contributed to ARIS V2, a real-time manufacturing AI assistant using LangChain, LangGraph, MCP tool orchestration, planning/execution flows, OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, Qdrant, and Elasticsearch/OpenSearch-backed retrieval.
• Supported rollout expansion from ARIS V1 in 4 of 17 client production plants to ARIS V2 currently active in 13 of 17 plants, increasing real-world deployment coverage to more than 50% of the client footprint.
• Worked on document-grounded RAG functionality including ingestion, OCR, chunking, embeddings, indexing, retrieval, reranking, and grounded answer generation for industrial workflows.

Stack: Python, Django, DRF, FastAPI, LangChain, LangGraph, GraphQL, Celery, WebSockets, OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, Qdrant, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Docker.

• Mentor team of 6 ML platform engineers through weekly 1:1s, technical design reviews, and best practices, improving team velocity by 35% through structured sprint planning and skill development programs
• Define 2025–2026 ML platform roadmap in collaboration with Data Science, Cloud Engineering, and Product teams, prioritizing automated model governance, cost attribution systems, and multi-environment deployment strategies
• Partner with Data Science, SRE, and Product stakeholders to align ML platform capabilities with business objectives, reducing data scientist deployment friction by 60% through self-service platforms
• Architect and deliver production-grade MLOps platform supporting 50+ models in production with automated promotion pipelines, versioning, and rollback capabilities, achieving 99.5% platform uptime SLA
• Design distributed ML pipeline architecture using Metaflow and Argo Workflows (Vertex Pipelines-compatible), reducing model training time by 30% and deployment cycles from 2 weeks to 3 days through full CI/CD automation
• Build containerized ML services on Kubernetes with auto-scaling policies, resource quotas, and multi-tenancy isolation, optimizing infrastructure costs by $180K annually (25% reduction)
• Implement monitoring, alerting, and performance tracking using Prometheus, Grafana, and custom instrumentation, reducing model debugging time by 50% and establishing model performance SLOs
• Lead development of RAG-based document intelligence platform using LangChain, LangGraph, and vector databases, implementing agentic AI workflows for automated financial document processing
• Implement Infrastructure-as-Code using Terraform for reproducible environment provisioning and GitOps workflows, reducing infrastructure drift incidents by 80%
• Design role-based access control for ML platform, implement model lineage tracking, and establish audit trails for regulatory compliance aligned with enterprise IAM best practices

• Held direct line management responsibility for a team of 4 Platform Engineers — owning hiring, performance reviews, and career development — while establishing a shared engineering standards framework and coaching culture that accelerated delivery across client engagements.
• Led a team of engineers to architect a cloud-native voice AI system for a major inspection client, enabling 2,500 field inspectors to document work fully hands-free via real-time transcription and AI agents — eliminating manual data entry across 440,000 inspections per month and reducing per-user cost from $9 to $1. Stack: AWS (DynamoDB, S3, Transcribe, CloudFront, API Gateway, Bedrock), ElevenLabs, Claude.
• Led a team of engineers to automate multi-region Kubernetes cluster management for a global SaaS leader, reducing provisioning time from 3 weeks to under a day and eliminating 90% of configuration errors. Stack: EKS, Terragrunt, Python, Bash, ArgoCD.
• Accelerator - Cloud-Agnostic AI Platform: Architected and delivered a cloud-agnostic, Kubernetes-native platform as an accelerator, enabling multi-tenant, enterprise-scale management of self-hosted LLMs with concurrent deployment of multiple base models and dynamic LoRA adapter serving. Designed production infrastructure using open-source tooling (ArgoCD, Karpenter, vLLM, SGLang) with automated model lifecycle management, API security (Keycloak + LiteLLM), and cost-optimized GPU provisioning.

In a lean, execution-focused environment, I took ownership beyond a narrow engineering lane, shaping and implementing systems across backend, data, and infrastructure. Partnered directly with the three founders in a fast-moving, high-stakes environment, turning strategic priorities into concrete technical decisions and production outcomes.

• Owned core platform development across backend (Django/Rest Framework/Postgres), ETL (Python/Dagster), infrastructure (Terraform/Kubernetes/AWS), and frontend (typescript/react) for a climate-tech SaaS product, driving continuous cross-stack development across five repositories from October 2021 to this day.
• Architected and owned a standalone internal Python scoring framework for CRC assessments, using YAML-driven rules and metaprogramming to enable non-technical users to define complex evaluation logic without hardcoded implementations.
• Built and stabilized ETL and scraping pipelines using Dagster and Scrapfly, improving document ingestion, tagging, retry behavior, deployment flow, and operational resilience.
• Contributed to platform modernization and reliability through Django/Python upgrades, Postgres/RDS and EKS changes, CDN/TLS updates, test and performance improvements, and observability hardening.
• Drove backend engineering for product features, translating requirements into technical specifications, API contracts, data structures, and scalable implementation plans.

• Cloud Computing Fundamentals & Architecture: Expertise in core cloud concepts, including the three main Service Models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) and diverse Deployment Models (Public, Private, Hybrid, Multi-cloud).
• Modern Application Deployment Strategies (GCP Focus): Instruction on the GCP Application Hosting Spectrum, covering Virtual Machines, Containers (Kubernetes and Cloud Run), Platform as a Service (App Engine), and Serverless Computing (Functions as a Service - FaaS).
• Data Management & Big Data Analytics: Comprehensive coverage of Cloud Storage options (Object, Block, File) and Database solutions, including Relational (Cloud SQL), NoSQL (Firestore, BigTable, Memorystore), and serverless enterprise data warehousing (BigQuery).
• DevOps and Infrastructure Automation: Skills in DevOps principles, including Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CD), Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using tools like Terraform, and implementing effective Monitoring and Logging for system observability.
• Emerging Technologies & Responsible Cloud Use: Focus on crucial topics like Cloud and IoT Security, Identity and Access Management (IAM), data privacy, and the ethical considerations of cloud and massive data collection.

• Built and operated an AWS Landing Zone with Terraform / OpenTofu (multi-account structure, IAM baselines, network and security standards)
• Designed and operated platform-oriented AWS architectures to standardize infrastructure and operations processes
• Built and operated Kubernetes-based platforms (EKS) as a shared runtime environment for application teams
• Established GitOps-based deployments with Argo CD and FluxCD
• Developed and operated central CI/CD platforms (GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins)
• Enabled developer and project teams with reusable platform components
• Introduced and implemented FinOps structures (AWS Cost Explorer, CUR + Athena, Infracost, Grafana dashboards)
• Built and operated central observability platforms (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Alertmanager, CloudWatch)

• Led multiple concurrent, enterprise-scale technical programs spanning backend services, APIs, identity platforms, cloud infrastructure, and security
• Actively participated in system architecture and design reviews, validating service interactions, data flows, security models, and scalability requirements
• Worked hands-on with engineering teams to decompose complex initiatives into technical epics, stories, and deliverables
• Reviewed technical approaches, migration strategies, and rollout plans to minimize operational and security risk
• Delivered SSO, MFA, directory services, SaaS integrations, and platform modernization impacting tens of thousands of users globally
• Drove Agile delivery across globally distributed teams; facilitated ceremonies, resolved blockers, and improved engineering throughput
• Established technical RAID logs, dependency maps, and milestone-based execution plans in regulated enterprise environments
• Acted as a trusted technical partner to senior leadership, translating complex engineering topics into business-relevant outcomes

• Evolved the platform from bare-metal infrastructure with a monolithic PHP application to a hybrid Google Cloud architecture with Go microservices on Kubernetes
• Managed and scaled a production infrastructure with 300+ VMs and dozens of clusters, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, Redis and Elasticsearch clusters
• Designed architecture, deployment, monitoring, performance analysis, and upgrades for all platform services using Terraform and Ansible
• Migrated observability systems from ELK and Prometheus to Datadog, managed with Terraform
• Introduced Jenkins CI/CD with SonarQube integration and automated tests to speed up feedback cycles
• Containerized the testing environment and implemented GitLab CI pipelines for Docker image builds, static code analysis, and infrastructure tests
• Performed zero-downtime migrations of MySQL and MongoDB clusters to Google Cloud
• Developed reusable Ansible roles for database clusters and automated data obfuscation for staging environments
• Decomposed monolithic databases and migrated to microservice architectures
• Built tools to detect and optimize slow queries in MySQL and MongoDB
• Conducted online schema migrations with pt-online-schema-change without downtime windows
• Developed internal Go applications for batch queries, GitLab-Jira integration, and MongoDB backup recovery
• Technologies: Debian, Ubuntu, Alpine, Go, Bash, Python, PHP, SQL, GitLab CI, Jenkins, Drone CI, MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, RabbitMQ, Kafka, Docker, Kubernetes, Nomad, Ansible, Terraform, Grafana, ELK, Prometheus, Datadog, Nagios, Zabbix, Nginx, HAProxy, Vault, Helm, SonarQube, Filebeat, Auditbeat, Google Cloud, AWS

• Designed and operated a GitOps-based Kubernetes platform, migrating services from AWS ECS to Amazon EKS.
• Built automated CI/CD pipelines for container build and deployment using GitLab CI, Helm, and Argo CD.
• Developed reusable Helm charts for Kubernetes resources (Ingress, Services, Secrets, HPA, ExternalDNS).
• Provisioned and managed EKS (Fargate and EC2) using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform / OpenTofu).
• Implemented OIDC-based authentication and authorization (Okta) for secure access to Kubernetes and Argo CD.
• Improved container security by migrating services to distroless images.
• Implemented logging, monitoring, and observability to ensure system reliability and performance.
• Automated cloud cost optimisation using Python (Boto3), achieving approximately 45% cost savings.
• Led migration of AWS infrastructure to IaC, reducing configuration drift and deployment issues.
• Produced technical documentation and operational runbooks, supporting internal engineering teams.

• Operated and stabilized Kubernetes platform
• Implemented a complete observability stack
• Set up GitOps deployment processes with ArgoCD
• Defined SLIs/SLOs and governance
• Conducted incident analysis and automated operations

• Architectural Design of GCP Infrastructure Models
• Consultant for Strategic Migration Decisions
• Lead Engineer for Platform Automation
• Lead Engineer for Deployment of New Applications

• Designed a platform based on IoT, Azure, Kubernetes, and Postgres for an existing application
• Migrated from "click-ops" and UI-defined CI/CD pipelines to infrastructure-as-code with Terraform, enabling complete redeployment of multiple environments
• Technologies: Terraform, OpenTofu, Azure, Azure DevOps, Kafka, IoT, Kubernetes, Grafana, Prometheus, GitOps, relational databases