Elasticsearch Expert in Berlin

• 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.

• 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.

• 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

• 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

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.

• Designed and implemented a hybrid recommendation system (content-based + collaborative filtering)
• Built end-to-end ML pipelines including data processing, feature engineering, model training, and evaluation
• Developed RAG-based LLM systems using LangChain and vector databases for semantic search and knowledge retrieval
• Established MLOps workflows with MLflow for experiment tracking, versioning, and deployment readiness
• Implemented deep learning models (computer vision & classification) using PyTorch and TensorFlow

OpsWorker turns Kubernetes alerts into root-cause analyses, on top of the monitoring a team already runs. I lead the technical side: the agent architecture, the AWS infrastructure it runs on (fully inside EU regions), and the engineering decisions behind it, read-only in the cluster by default, human in the loop for judgment. The stack underneath: Amazon Bedrock and Bedrock AgentCore, agents built with the Strands Agents SDK, the Claude and OpenAI APIs, and the Kubernetes API.

• Provide the Price Listing Service team with prices for all cars and vans in different markets
• Adapt market-specific requirements such as taxes, government subsidies, campaigns
• Import and synchronize new prices for all new and existing cars and store them in the Redis datastore
• Support our product and on-call duty
• Daily business, development of new features, bug fixing
• Pair programming, code review, mob programming
• Develop POCs for new ideas
• Maintain and extend the backend
• DevOps tasks
• Run Kubernetes updates
• Adjust and further develop Kubernetes resources
• Develop and adapt Helm charts
• Adapt and update ArgoCD
• Maintain, adapt, and improve CI/CD

• Development and rollout of a browser-based platform for camera streaming, augmented reality (AR), and visual computing
• Device-independent camera streaming for smartphones, tablets, desktop PCs, as well as VR and AR headsets
• Ensuring GDPR-compliant hosting in Open Telekom Cloud and other sovereign cloud providers
• Intuitive visual and collaborative features to increase efficiency and integrate smoothly into existing business software

• Develop and demonstrate solutions using GenAI software like langchain, vercel ai sdk, copilotkit
• Work with customers to understand their challenges and provide the best solutions based on open-source data products
• Build RAG and GraphRAG solutions using Neo4j, lancedb, and Postgres
• Deploy a LLMOps platform using kubernetes, terraform, helmfile, Arize phoenix, mlflow
• Architect and build data pipelines using dbt, Trino, Spark, Iceberg, Airflow, ArgoCD, terraform, kubernetes
• Delivered user-centred technical strategy for Agriculture 4.0 and precision livestock farming, helping my client secure funding from Bpifrance
• Delivered a prospecting tool for a leading French solar carport installer, using geospatial computing (GIS), speeding up the sales process
• Built digital twin architecture for solar carports and EV chargers, making real-time monitoring and smart charging possible

• Bootstrapping a CloudOps team and building a multi-cloud provider backend for a low-code Internal Developer Platform (IDP) with env zero

• Introducing user story mapping, ADRs, milestones, and backlog management

• Designing and developing core APIs, setting up CI/CD pipelines, OpenTofu/Terraform scripts

• Representing and communicating the team with third-party stakeholders (e.g. env zero)

• (Cross-)team coaching on DevOps, software design, Terraform, Golang, and agile practices

• Developed a Generative AI-based image recommendation engine for an AI video production system
• Implemented automatic image analysis with GPT-4o
• Built semantic vector search using OpenAI embeddings, MongoDB, and OpenSearch
• Tagged and indexed 4 million customer assets
• Redeveloped recommendation engine with a hybrid, balanced keyword and vector search plus filters

• Freelance Software Engineer with a focus on backend (Python/Django) and frontend (VueJS).