Apache Kafka Expert in Berlin

• 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.

• 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.

• Building up the Enterprise Architecture department. Preparing the convergence of IT / OT.
• Mapping the global business application landscape (6 countries).
• Concept for a graph model of the application landscape. Storing the results in the open-source graph database Neo4J. Various reports in the database query language CYPHER and the visualization component BLOOM. Automatic generation of IT architecture diagrams.
• Development of an application taxonomy to identify redundant applications.
• Applying Gartner's Software Portfolio Management TIME model (Tolerate, Invest, Migrate, and Eliminate) for portfolio management.
• Enterprise Architecture Governance: establishing architecture guidelines for documenting measures and decisions.
• Process modeling according to Porter (Value Chain).
• Various architecture approvals for change requests and documentation in Architecture Decision Records (ADR).
• Working on the RACI matrix for various processes.
• Working on business capabilities as preparation for a LeanIX rollout.
• Contributing to the concept for IT/OT convergence.
• Establishing architecture guidelines in a very pragmatic corporate culture. Knowledge about applications and responsibilities is spread across the world.

• Delivered a new notifications platform implementation built from scratch to replace existing and upcoming services
• Collaborating with other teams to integrate more domains

Tech stack:

• Data: Scala 3, Apache Kafka, Python, Airflow, Astronomer
• BE-FE: TypeScript, NestJS, Java, Spring Boot, Vue
• Dev-ops: AWS, PostgreSQL, Docker, GitHub Actions, Kubernetes, Helm, ArgoCD

• Led development of 15+ microservices (Java 17, Spring Boot) driving customer interactions; migrated from on-prem to GCP Kubernetes, improving scalability and reducing infra cost by 20%.
• Optimized user services with CouchDB caching and API refactoring, cutting response times by 35% and enhancing customer experience.
• Implemented canary deployments, FluxCD GitOps, and CI/CD optimizations in GitLab, reducing release lead time by 25% and enabling zero-downtime rollouts.
• Set up Grafana health checks and Anodot alerts for latency, error, and throughput monitoring, reducing MTTR by 40%.
• Built secure APIs using OAuth2, DPoP, and Gatekeeper, integrated REST and GraphQL, and achieved 90%+ test coverage with unit and E2E tests.
• Mentored junior developers, promoted Agile best practices, and collaborated cross-functionally to deliver high-impact, reliable customer-facing features.

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.

• Designed, built, and launched an internal event planning web application used by over 100 department leads for a large event, despite having no dedicated testing phase.

• Ensured smooth, failure-free operation during first production use, leading to the tool being adopted for future events.

• Automated catering calculations and related workflows, significantly reducing email communication and manual computation effort for meal planning.

• Managed deployment and hosting on a Linux server using Coolify, including application setup and runtime operations.

• Hired and guided a communication designer on UX while independently owning all technical decisions and implementation.

• 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.

• Developed and deployed microservices in Kotlin and Spring Boot, integrated AWS Secrets Manager to secure credentials and decreased network calls using Spring cache.
• Refactored Kafka consumer using Spring Kafka with semaphore-based backpressure to cap records and keep heap memory stable under spikes; switched to batch upserts to cut down on database invocations; added Testcontainers integration tests for Kafka and database to pave the way for future changes.
• Automated the financial reconciliation workflow in Spring Boot (Kotlin) using Spring Scheduler, transactional boundaries, JPA/Hibernate on MySQL, and Flyway migrations, saving the accounts team 16+ hours per week.
• Designed and dockerized payments end-to-end test framework in Robot (Python) with reusable keyword libraries and profiles; integrated with GitLab CI (JaCoCo XML and HTML reports) to accelerate releases and lift code coverage to 80%.
• Implemented end-to-end observability on Datadog by instrumenting services with Datadog APM, correlating metrics and logs, provisioning dashboards, and creating monitors with burn-rate alerts and anomalies to harden reliability and give stakeholders clear visibility.

• Acted as technical consultant to optimize multi-layer ensemble models combining ResNet, CNN-BiGRU-Attention, and XGBoost.
• Guided implementation of a Logistic Regression meta-learner to solve class imbalance problems, achieving 92.86% accuracy and 0.9644 AUC on PTB-XL and Chapman-Shaoxing datasets.

• Defined and executed product vision & strategy, collaborating with UX, architecture, and engineering teams, resulting in a 30% improvement in user satisfaction across key product touchpoints.
• Owned end-to-end product lifecycle management, overseeing the launch of 5 major product updates, improving product efficiency and feature adoption by 25%.
• Defined and structured epics, features, and user stories; validated and ensured 100% of completed stories met definition of ‘Done' before release.
• Led backlog grooming, prioritization (WSJF, MoSCoW), and sprint planning, ensuring 95% on-time delivery of features in quarterly release cycles.
• Worked with technologies: API, Angular, Node, ReactNative (Mobile), SQL, Kafka, AWS cloud with ES (Elastic search) with JSON file indexes.
• Used Confluence and Jira for maintaining product details and product backlogs for 10 years.
• Used Figma, Sketch, Miro for 4 years.
• Directed cross-functional teams, coordinating with developers, designers, and business units, driving a 40% reduction in time-to-market for critical features.
• Spearheaded product release demos, UAT, and go-to-market (GTM) strategies, leading to a 15% increase in user adoption within the first quarter of launch.
• Optimized member experience on Anthem's digital health platform, resulting in a 20% increase in active user engagement and a 10% boost in member retention.

• Founded an AI-powered scheduling and business-management SaaS for SMBs, owning technology strategy, architecture, product development, UX, billing and go-to-market execution.
• Architected and shipped a multi-tenant platform with REST APIs, RBAC, CRM, billing and notifications, powering the manager dashboard, admin console, booking experience and iOS/Android applications.
• Led and mentored 7 software engineers, 1 DevOps engineer, 1 QA engineer and 1 UX/UI designer, while remaining hands-on across backend, frontend and product delivery.
• Built AI voice and chat agents using Python/FastAPI, OpenAI and Anthropic APIs, RAG, pgvector and tool calling; integrated Twilio, Google Calendar/Meet, Stripe and Firebase.
• Owned production infrastructure and automated delivery across separate environments using Docker, Nginx, GitHub Actions and Grafana; represented the company at accelerators and international startup events.

Selected stack: Python, FastAPI, Node.js, Vue 3, React/Next.js, React Native, PostgreSQL, Redis, Docker

• Building independent projects in the AI/developer tools space.
• Experimenting with product ideas, rapid prototyping, and go-to-market validation.
• Designing AI-native operating model—leveraging agentic pipelines, living context schemas, and rigorous eval harnesses to multiply individual contributor leverage and eliminate implementation bottlenecks.

Working as independent / interim / fractional CTO / engineering director, technical leader, builder, coach. Select achievements:

• Fractional CTO for a music-tech startup. Helped unlock further funding by providing the technical strategy and plan behind their vision and pitch deck, then executed it: vision to a working beta, 0 to 1, on time and on budget against that plan.
• AI automation for a compliance business. An annual research process — days of a person working through spreadsheets and checking websites by hand, so costly it had been abandoned for years — now runs automatically every month and takes about an hour to review. Stale or missing data became current data, twelve times a year.
• An AI development autopilot. Agents take an approved ticket, implement test-first, verify against a running system and open a pull request. An AI committee reviews on various categories and provides risk assessments based on my specs. Nothing merges without a human.
• Coaching and sparring for engineering leaders. Developing engineering managers was most of my job as a director; I now do it one to one.