Amazon RDS 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

• Task Engineering: Evaluating Coding Agents.
• Asset Creation: Building realistic task environments using datasets and files in German. Crucially, these assets must remain in the target language to genuinely measure multilingual handling.
• Prompting & Translation: finding failure points where AI does not work, in German.
• Implementation & Verification: Supporting the development of robust solutions (reference implementations) and write highly reliable, deterministic verifier scripts (using rubric-based judging only when strictly necessary).
• Calibration & Execution: Analyze execution logs and calibrate task difficulty (Easy to Very Hard) using standard Terminal-Bench run configurations against various model tiers (Haiku, Opus).
• Quality Assurance: Participation in a rigorous, 4-layer human quality control process (creation, human review, calibration review, and audit) alongside automated LLM-based checks to ensure fairness, grammatical accuracy, and benchmark integrity.
• Linguistic Review: Reviewing AI benchmark tasks across Hindi, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, Czech and Turkish.

• Focus: system architecture, cloud-native platforms, microservices, API design
• Product: Pflege-Pfad is a digital matchmaking platform that connects relatives of people in need of care directly with verified care services and caregivers - without an agency and without ongoing fees.
• Business analysis & process design:
• Analysis of the German care market and identification of the key pain points of both target groups.
• Modeling of the core business processes: registration, verification, care request, application, placement, and rating.
• Definition of the business model as a freemium/premium model with optional contact unlocking.
• Creation of user stories and requirements documentation for relatives, care services, and administrators.
• Design of trust and quality assurance mechanisms with document upload, admin review process, and rating system.
• Coordination with stakeholders and validation of product decisions with potential users.
• Technical implementation:
• Design and implementation of the entire platform architecture as a solo developer.
• Design and implementation of a REST API with Spring Boot and Kotlin, including JWT-based authentication.
• Development of the frontend as a single-page application with Angular 17.
• Implementation of the AWS infrastructure with EC2, RDS PostgreSQL, S3, CloudFront, and IAM.
• Document upload with AWS S3 via presigned URLs for verification of care services.
• Email notifications via Resend API.
• AI-supported care service search via OpenAI API.
• Implementation of complete user flows such as registration, login, password reset, and placement process.
• Building an admin panel for user and care service management as well as analytics.
• CI/CD with GitHub Actions and containerized deployments with Docker.
• End-to-end tests with Playwright.

Technologies: Kotlin, Spring Boot 3, Spring Security, JWT, JPA/Hibernate, PostgreSQL, Angular 17, TypeScript, RxJS, AWS (EC2, ECS, S3, CloudFront CDN, RDS PostgreSQL, IAM), nginx, GitHub Actions, Playwright, Maven, Git, OpenAI API, Resend API, Docker, Scrum, i18n (DE/EN/TR), Kiro, feature-flag architecture.

• 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)

• SPA for automated communication of medical findings with role-based access (Sanctum)
• Server-side LLM integration (OpenRouter) with structured processing
• Automated sending via SMS/voice call (Twilio, ElevenLabs) with queue + status retry
• Full test coverage with 80+ documented test cases

Technologies: PHP, Laravel, LLM API (OpenRouter), Twilio, ElevenLabs, Laravel Sanctum, PHPUnit, Playwright, Docker, REST

• Architected and deployed private cloud data platform on VMware vSphere, integrating Greenplum MPP, Apache Kafka, Kubernetes, and Apache Solr, and developed real-time ingestion pipelines with Kafka Connect and Schema Registry.
• Led Oracle Exadata to Greenplum migration, rearchitected data models, optimized storage, implemented RabbitMQ with Debezium for CDC, and deployed VectorDB for Generative AI.
• Designed and executed multi-cloud migration PoC across AWS, Azure, and GCP, defined KPIs for throughput, latency, and cost efficiency, executed bulk data transfers, validated analytics and streaming workloads, and delivered full-scale architecture recommendations.
• Assessed legacy on-premises infrastructure and designed modern cloud-native data platforms using Greenplum and containerized microservices, advising on scalability, disaster recovery, and high-availability.

• 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

Design and implementation of a compact ERP, CRM, accounting, and production-planning platform for a German food manufacturer. The system replaces Rechnung11, self-built Excel sheets, and manual processes for fewer than 10 internal users.

• Designed and implemented the full platform architecture as sole architect and developer.
• Built modules for customer management, B2B order handling, invoicing, production planning, and accounting support.
• Implemented DATEV export, ZUGFeRD/XRechnung e-invoicing, FinTS bank statement synchronization, and GoBD audit trail concepts.
• Used AI-supported workflows for prototyping, test support, and implementation acceleration while retaining full architecture, review, testing strategy, and technical ownership.

Technology: Java 23, Spring Boot 3, Spring Data JPA, Spring Security, Vue 3, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Flyway, REST, OpenAPI, JWT, TOTP, RBAC, DATEV, FinTS, ZUGFeRD, XRechnung, GoBD, JUnit, Mockito, Testcontainers, Playwright, Docker, GitLab CI/CD

Development and evolutionary further development of a highly available, cloud-native microservice and integration architecture for dealer and retail processes in the Porsche Car Configurator.

Responsibilities

• Development of Java-/Kotlin-based backend, API, and integration components (Spring Boot)
• Integration of internal and external systems via REST/OpenAPI, GraphQL, Apache Kafka, and AWS SQS (synchronous and asynchronous)
• Implementation of stable, high-performance communication and data flows in a cloud-native platform architecture
• Processing of structured data formats (JSON, Protobuf, GraphQL schemas) based on existing API patterns
• Performance optimization of distributed microservices with reduced response times and higher operational stability
• Technical tests (unit, integration, and API tests) as well as error analysis in production-like environments
• AWS Infrastructure as Code with Terraform and AWS CDK
• CI/CD automation (build, test, and deployment pipelines) with GitHub Actions
• AI-supported feature implementation (GitHub Copilot Agent)

Label: Kotlin, Java 25, Spring Boot 4, Protobuf, TypeScript, AWS, Terraform, CDK, Apache Kafka, AWS SQS, REST/OpenAPI, GraphQL, JSON, PostgreSQL, Docker, GitHub Actions, Maven, Gradle, JUnit, Mockito, Testcontainers

• 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

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.

Designed and developed an AI-powered automation platform using n8n to analyze social media niches, identify target audiences, and automate marketing strategy generation. The solution combined AI agents, workflow orchestration, and data analysis to automate research processes and generate data-driven insights.

• Designed and implemented complex automation workflows using n8n
• Developed AI-powered analysis agents for market and audience research
• Integrated multiple APIs and AI services into automated workflows
• Built automated market, competitor, and target audience analysis pipelines
• Leveraged Large Language Models (LLMs) for information summarization, classification, and prioritization
• Containerized and deployed the platform using Docker

Technologies: n8n, AI Agents, OpenAI APIs, Prompt Engineering, LLMs, Docker, Linux, REST APIs, Webhooks