Amazon EKS Experts in Germany

Maturing their API practices on both a business and technology level. My role covers 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, Node.js, TypeScript, Redocly, reactive programming, CDC, Golang, Gin, GitOps, DX (developer experience), stakeholder management, roadmaps, workshops, discovery.

Built an international e-commerce platform for a multi-vendor marketplace for digital assets from scratch. Designed and operated cloud native architectures at enterprise scale.

• Designed and operated a highly scalable microservice and serverless architecture
• Built the complete cloud infrastructure with Terraform + AWS CDK in AWS
• Provisioned ECS/EKS clusters (Fargate), Application Load Balancers (reverse proxy), and Lambda functions
• Observability & tracing with CloudWatch, DataDog, Prometheus, and Grafana
• End-to-end setup with DataDog (formerly AWS CloudWatch), Prometheus, and custom Grafana dashboards
• Integration of advanced metrics (including ORM mapper) and distributed tracing with Jaeger
• Robust backup and disaster recovery strategies
• RDS Postgres backups and hourly snapshots
• Read-only, asynchronously synchronized replicas with automated master failover in emergencies
• Minute-level rollback capability through versioned Docker images on ECS and Git-based CI/CD pipelines
• Created CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions for automated multi-stage deployments (Dev, Testing, Prod)
• Integrated Stripe for international payment processing
• Built a marketplace payment system with multiple parties and payout routines
• Used Algolia for high-performance real-time search of digital assets on the platform
• Federation of services with GraphQL and Hasura
• Later migration to GraphQL Mesh
• Test Driven Development (TDD) - unit, integration, and E2E testing with Jest, Vitest, and Playwright
• Used Next.js / React for modern frontend applications in the nx monorepo
• Enterprise security architecture & access control
• Integration of JWT tokens with Auth0, OAuth, OIDC, IP guards, BOLA protection, and secret vaults
• Authorization concepts with RBAC, ABAC, and native Postgres Row-Level Security (RLS)
• Built internal microfrontends with Retool for fast prototyping and operational business processes

Technologies: ABAC, AWS CDK, AWS CloudWatch, AWS ECS, AWS EKS, AWS Fargate, AWS RDS, AWS S3, Algolia, Auth0, DataDog, Docker, GitHub Actions, Grafana, GraphQL, GraphQL Mesh, Hasura, JWT, Jaeger, Java, JavaScript, Jest, Kotlin, Kubernetes, Monorepo, Next.js, OIDC, Playwright, Postgres, Postgres RLS, Prometheus, RBAC, Redis, Retool, Serverless, Stripe, Terraform, TypeScript, Vitest

• Built and scaled a 35-member engineering team (Core Engineering, QA, and SRE) in 12 months, accelerating Midnight’s blockchain development on Parity’s Substrate framework.
• Defined strategic direction and aligned technology development with business objectives as a key member of the leadership.
• Optimized software development processes and implemented agile methodologies, enhancing operational efficiency and code security.
• Delivered projects in a fast-paced startup environment through effective project management and resource allocation.

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

Scope:

• Operation and configuration of the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, including network, storage, and security design.
• Implementation of centralized observability solutions (Prometheus, Grafana, alerting).
• Development of CI/CD pipelines, GitOps workflows, and automation frameworks.
• Training and enablement of operations and development teams.

Result: Accelerated service delivery, transparent operational metrics, and sustainable knowledge transfer.

• Kubernetes: EKS management, cluster upgrades and stability improvements, Infrastructure-as-Code reviews and updates, AWS support, and cost optimization.

• Led migration to GCP using Terraform, GKE, and GitOps, improving deployment consistency and scalability
• Implemented Datadog observability stack via Terraform and datadog-operator
• Established automated end-to-end tests and on-call processes, improving incident response and service reliability
• Migrated from NGINX Ingress Controller to Kubernetes Gateway API (NGINX Gateway Fabric)
• Migrated stateful services (PostgreSQL and Redis) to GCP, improving scalability and operational reliability

• Built and further developed an AWS landing zone based on 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 development and project teams through reusable platform building blocks
• Introduced and implemented FinOps structures (AWS Cost Explorer, CUR + Athena, Infracost, Grafana dashboards)
• Built and operated central observability platforms (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Alertmanager, CloudWatch)

• 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)

Transmission system operator – network provisioning platform (team lead)

• Designed the saga orchestrator in Python that provisions network fabrics with rollback.
• Split IP, identity, and resource allocation into bounded contexts with their own databases and typed clients.
• Implemented data access using DDD repositories and units of work, with no SQL in the domain code.
• Required integration tests using real PostgreSQL and RabbitMQ containers, and API fuzzing for every service.
• Introduced an agent workflow where a spec starts each change and a human approves every merge.
• Rolled out OpenTelemetry auto-instrumentation through GitOps across eighteen Kubernetes clusters.
• Led incident response for stuck provisioning and recorded every outage as a post-mortem.

Languages and software used: Python, FastAPI, Pydantic v2, SQLAlchemy async, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, Celery, pytest, testcontainers, schemathesis, Helm, Flux CD, GitLab CI, OpenTelemetry, pi coding agent.

Software product company – datacenter simulation SaaS (backend development)

• Built the asynchronous simulation pipeline as the second-largest contributor among more than twenty team members.
• Tagged every image by commit SHA and semver in the GitHub Actions deployment workflows.
• Diagnosed the RabbitMQ memory alarm that froze every simulation and fixed the limits in the Helm chart.
• Converted the test suite to function-style pytest, with coverage reported in every pipeline.

Languages and software used: Python, FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, Alembic, Celery, RabbitMQ, Redis, PostgreSQL, S3, EKS, Helm, Keycloak, GitHub Actions, pytest, mypy, ruff, SonarQube.

Internal AI platform – model serving and telemetry

• Built the FastAPI service that deploys open-weight models on GPU tiers as OpenAI-compatible endpoints.
• Upgraded production EKS by two Kubernetes minor versions and fixed zone-bound storage faults.
• Traced every model call, including its token count, cost, and latency, through the OpenTelemetry operator.

Languages and software used: Python, FastAPI, vLLM, LangGraph, pydantic-ai, OpenAI and Anthropic APIs, EKS, Helm, Flux CD, Terraform, GitLab CI, OpenTelemetry, Grafana.

• Development and introduction of operations processes
• Preparation of complete documentation packages (including incident management and operations support) to meet compliance requirements
• Introduction of a workshop on IaC (Infrastructure as Code)
• Technical consulting for the project security concept (ISMS)
• Installation and operation of Kubernetes clusters on AWS, on-prem, and Azure
• Hybrid cloud architecture design (on-prem, Hetzner, AWS)
• Analysis and troubleshooting of incidents and system outages
• Network adjustments for firewall rules, gateways, OpenVPN settings, and IPsec tunnels (pfSense)
• Technical consulting on Bitbucket, Jenkins, and GitLab CI/CD pipelines
• Consulting on Ansible deployments and infrastructure automation
• Consulting on building a scalable system in the cloud (AWS / Azure)
• Technologies / Tools: Ansible, Terraform, AWS, Azure, VPN, pfSense, Jenkins, Bitbucket, Kubernetes, GitLab Runner, ISMS, Golang, Prometheus, Grafana, S3, Lambda, RDS, ECS, Cognito, OIDC, Harbor, MinIO, Postgres, Redis, Keycloak, Ceph, Proxmox, CloudFormation, PostgreSQL, Flux CD, Hetzner, IONOS, Sonatype Nexus Repository, Entra ID, Dex IdP, Pulumi

Task:

• Design and build a proof of concept (PoC) for a future-proof virtualization platform, taking secure system architectures into account
• Assess the current state of existing infrastructures and develop selection and evaluation criteria for the right OS virtualization platform
• Carry out the requirements analysis and then create and prioritize tickets in the ticket system
• Complete and continuously update a tool evaluation matrix based on PoC results
• Support team knowledge building through clear documentation of the approach and results in Confluence
• Enterprise analysis of existing hardware (creating different BoMs)

Technologies: Vmware, Vmware Aria Operations, Osism, Canonical OpenStack, FishOs, Linux, Terraform, Ansible, Confluence, Alma

• Creation, maintenance and hardening of Kubernetes clusters employing Ansible and ArgoCD
• Keywords: Ansible, AWX, Kubernetes, NetApp, Prometheus, CI/CD ArgoCD, SSO, Fluent-bit, HAProxy, Calico, Keycloak, oauth2-proxy, SealedSecrets, kubeseal, Aqua kube-bench, CIS-Benchmarks, Aqua Trivy operator

• Delivered MVP-focused full-stack architecture for a health-sector client: Vite/React frontend, backend services on Google Cloud Run, and Supabase for database plus IAM/authentication.
• Supported product requirements engineering and prioritized cost-aware workload placement, implementing browser-side/edge computation where feasible before moving logic to backend services.

• Azure Landing Zone architecture: Design and implement a hub-spoke, multi-region-capable Azure landing zone that provides the secure, scalable and highly available foundation for autonomous driving and parking data/ML platforms.
• Compliance through Azure Policy: Enforce security and compliance standards across Azure subscriptions via Azure Policy (guardrails, deny/audit/deploy-if-not-exists), consistently achieving top-tier infrastructure security scores.
• Infrastructure-as-Code: Automate provisioning and configuration of Azure resources with Terraform and Bicep, with changes delivered through reviewed CI/CD pipelines.
• Azure Databricks and Unity Catalog: Extensive experience operating Azure Databricks with Unity Catalog for centralized data governance, access control, lineage and auditing across workspaces.
• Monitoring and observability: Built and run infrastructure monitoring and logging with Azure Monitor, Prometheus, Grafana and Loki, covering platform health, alerting, troubleshooting and capacity trends.
• Platform at scale: Architected and operate cloud data/ML platforms supporting multi-PB vehicle data ingestion and simulation; orchestrate Argo Workflow-based recompute and autolabeling services scaling to 100k+ concurrent pods on AKS.
• Reproducible ML: Established reproducible training environments with dataset versioning and provenance tracking, enabling auditing and experiment reliability.
• Operational excellence: Automated GitHub organization management and CI/CD pipelines, improving developer productivity and deployment reliability; automated recurring operational processes.
• FinOps: Developed transparent resource utilization and cost-tracking for multi-project Azure environments.
• Leadership: Technical lead for infrastructure topics, collaborating with development, DevOps and security teams; technical interviewer and recruitment panel member for scaling the engineering team.