GitLab CI/CD Experts in Hamburg

Co-founded a software agency building custom web and cross-platform products. I owned the technical decisions across the whole portfolio and led 12 people, while carrying delivery planning, process and client relationships for 11 clients across 3 industries.

• Technical leadership: owned the technical decisions for the codebase across every project — stack, architecture, code conventions and the tooling the team worked with — and led the developers on how work got built through code reviews, pair programming and mentoring across a team ranging from junior to senior, keeping the codebase coherent as the portfolio and the team grew

• Delivery planning against the financial plan: built the company's financial plan and derived from it the billable hours each developer had to reach per month and the hours each project could absorb to stay within budget; planned capacity and scope against those figures and negotiated budgets and delivery dates directly with clients

• Client ownership: technical contact across the portfolio — requirements gathering and prioritisation, scoping and estimates, timeline communication, budget negotiation, and consistent transparency throughout delivery

• Team and people: owned the hiring and interview process end to end and took responsibility for offboarding where it was needed; designed an onboarding that got new developers productive within 1–2 days; cleared blockers daily and kept a close eye on where effort was creating value and where it was not

• Process ownership: consolidated a micro-service landscape spread over 15+ repositories into a single monorepo, cutting backend development time by ~40% and simplifying releases for 6 engineers; set up deployment pipelines with GitHub Actions and GitLab CI; ran retrospectives and turned the feedback into concrete changes; introduced AI agents into day-to-day development

• Delivered short-staffed: when the team shrank from 8 developers to 2, restructured scope, introduced AI-assisted development to hold the schedule and took on Go backend work alongside my own frontend scope

• Architecture and code: defined the architecture for every project in the portfolio — the structure the rest of the team built within — and wrote roughly 90% of the frontend code myself, from SSR applications with Next.js and Remix to cross-platform apps with Capacitor

• From zero to production: took a practice management platform — administration, inventory, integrated online shop, chat messenger — from an empty repository to production. Live in 7 markets with at least 7 more coming up, serving tens of thousands of users

• Delivery under pressure: built and shipped a replacement online shop for a Fortune 250 client in 4 days, restoring order intake while their global shops had been offline for several weeks

• Design system: built a cross-project design system used across 7 products, so new projects and features started from a shared, consistent base

• Cross-platform and real-time: built iOS and Android apps with Capacitor for a client live event with 1,000+ participants — web sockets and push notifications for real-time content, Stripe payments supporting PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay and cards

Key technologies: React, TypeScript, Next.js, Remix, GraphQL, ConnectRPC, Redux, Zustand, Go, Node.js, Turborepo, Nx, Capacitor, Ionic, WebSockets, Stripe, PostgreSQL, Playwright, Cypress, Vitest, Storybook, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot

• work in the Developer-Experience team to improve developer experience and tooling for all teams of the RTL+ streaming platform
• development of reusable GitLab CI/CD components to standardize processes and automatically enforce code quality and security gates
• infrastructure automation with Pulumi
• operation and monitoring of GitLab Runners in AWS with Kubernetes
• integration and automation of Renovate in GitLab pipelines for continuous dependency updates
• extension of Backstage as the central developer platform to optimize internal workflows and self-service capabilities
• development of various tools and automations in TypeScript, Go, and Python

traigo is VTG's digital rail logistics and fleet management platform. It processes large volumes of telemetry, mileage, geofence, sensor and wagon-movement events in near real time and provides operational services for rail logistics customers across Europe.

As part of Team Customer Selfcare, I worked on the design, implementation, optimisation and operation of large-scale backend services and event-driven processing pipelines — covering both feature development and operational ownership of business-critical production systems. I also regularly acted as first responder for production incidents, data inconsistencies and performance investigations across multiple distributed services.

• Design and implementation of event-driven backend services.
• Migration and replacement of legacy processing pipelines.
• Development of replay / rebuild mechanisms for large event datasets.
• High-throughput asynchronous event processing on SNS / SQS.
• Database and query optimisation for PostgreSQL and DynamoDB.
• Design of scalable read / write models and aggregation pipelines.
• Production troubleshooting and operational support.
• Performance tuning and infrastructure scaling.
• Design and stabilisation of integration and system tests.
• Technical concepts, architecture documentation, and cross-team collaboration.
• Support the further development of existing GitLab CI/CD pipelines

Geofence & Wagon Stay Processing

• Algorithm to detect vehicles within geofences (entry, exit, dwell time).
• Event sourcing with guaranteed chronological order within the affected time window.
• Refactored geofence event and wagon-stay processing logic for performance.
• Resolved race conditions and event-ordering problems in distributed services; server-side filtering, aggregation and optimised query pipelines.
• Repair and replay tooling for corrupted or inconsistent movement data.

Fleet Metadata & Mileage

• Modernised the service; migrated storage from DynamoDB to PostgreSQL to improve traceability and accelerate new features.
• Scalable mileage aggregation and replay mechanisms.
• Read / write models and optimised queries for high-volume mileage calculations.

Sensor & Telematics Integration

• Integrated telemetry and sensor processing pipelines.
• Snapshot and state-calculation logic for sensor systems.
• APIs and persistence models for wagon sensor data; data-quality improvements.
• Further development of a service using gRPC for intra-service communication.

Movement Segment Processing & Routing

• Migrated services to new movement-segment event streams.
• Built replay and rebuild tooling for segment correction.
• Optimised throughput and reliability for high-volume event processing.

Condition Monitoring & Wagon Analytics

• APIs and backend services for wagon condition monitoring.
• Brake-wear prediction processing and wagon analytics functionality.
• PostgreSQL views and optimised query models for operational dashboards.

Operational Reliability - First Responder

• Investigated production incidents and distributed-system failures; DLQ analysis, replay and operational recovery.
• Tuned database performance and AWS infrastructure under production load.
• Improved observability, monitoring and operational tooling.
• Supported rollout strategies, monitoring and post-deployment stabilisation.

Fiverr client

• Fixed consumer issues in a production Kafka environment.
• Analyzed consumer lag with Datadog.
• Added synthetic tests to detect issues early.

Stack: Kafka, Datadog, Consumer Groups

• Designed and implemented a Python-based ETL pipeline with the Dagster framework to transform raw energy data from heterogeneous sources using InfluxDB and visualizations in Grafana
• Defined time-based and dependency-based jobs
• Deployed to managed Kubernetes clusters using Helm
• Integrated InfluxDB Cloud
• Prepared data for use in Grafana, including cleaning, normalization, and time-based resampling in Python
• Developed dashboards and visualizations in Grafana
• Developed unit tests with mocking using pytest
• Set up a CI/CD pipeline in GitLab

Technologies: Python, Dagster, InfluxDB, Grafana, pandas, pytest, REST, CI/CD, GitLab, Container, Kubernetes, Helm, Docker, Cloud

• Building an AI & Data Consultancy Practice with the goal of helping European companies adopt Artificial Intelligence and modern data platforms
• End-to-end further development of a production system using modified coding agents (OpenCode). Tech stack: Kubernetes, Argo, Keycloak, Typescript, Grafana, GitOps, DevOps, Playwright
• Internal research project on the use of coding agents in the field of mathematical logic for creating formal models. Use of Cursor IDE and Codex, Codex CLI. Architecture design, quality control and refactoring, as well as writing code and tests. Repository (open source) available pre-launch
• Research on the role of mathematical logic as a formal language that connects IT and AI with business processes
• Project lead for collecting and deploying parking recommendations for rail vehicles with significant savings potential based on real-time data in a mobility and transport company
• Project lead for collecting and distributing process measurement points for real-time control in a mobility and transport company
• Deputy application owner for an app used for communication in the dispatching and provision of rail vehicles

• Lead Drupal 10 developer for several greenfield projects in the health sector
• Drupal architecture in a cloud environment
• Setup and maintenance of Gitlab pipelines and Kustomize scripts for Kubernetes deployments
• Development of Docker images
• Drupal custom module development for clients such as OAuth and FHIR
• Drupal frontend theming based on Bootstrap 5 and Single Directory Components
• Setup and maintenance of automated Playwright tests

• I lead a team of 10 engineers across EMEA split into 2 squads (ingest and query), focused on developing the next generation of logging systems.
• Leading the Loki team in Europe, overseeing the logging solutions at Grafana. I manage a diverse team of engineers, ranging from mid-level to principal, ensuring we deliver top-tier results.
• One of our key achievements has been the successful development and launch of ExploreLogs and AdaptiveLogs.

• Role: Developer, Architect
• Technologies: java, typescript, golang, spring (boot, web, security, data), Angular, AWS (OpenSearch, Aurora, SNS/SQS, CloudWatch, EC2, IAM), Kubernetes, Terraform, Helm, OAuth, Keycloak, CI/CD, gradlew, Liquibase, Test Driven Development, shell scripting

• Working with developers, security, and operations teams to align requirements
• Supporting product owners and development teams in using logging and monitoring solutions based on the Elastic Stack
• Developing and standardizing log schemas as well as defining practical standards for observability
• Designing and further developing logging architectures for complex, distributed multi-tenant environments
• Connecting application and infrastructure logs as well as security tools and metrics
• Optimizing data flows and modeling for analysis and reporting purposes
• Building automated infrastructures using Terraform/Terragrunt and Ansible
• Maintaining and further developing CI/CD pipelines in GitLab as well as automated development environments in Hetzner Robot
• Operating and automating Proxmox clusters including Ceph storage
• Setting up and operating Kubernetes (k3s) clusters on Fedora CoreOS including base services such as Vault, OpenLDAP, and HA Proxy
• Implementing security-critical infrastructures according to BSI baseline protection and securing existing systems
• Supporting the operation of solutions in cloud environments (including AWS)
• Working in agile teams using Scrum and Kanban
• Technologies/ applications: Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Beats/Elastic Agent, Kibana), Terraform, Terragrunt, Ansible, GitLab CI/CD, GitOps, Proxmox, Proxmox Ceph, Kubernetes (k3s), OpenShift, Helm, Kustomize, Vault, OpenLDAP, HA Proxy, Hetzner Robot systems, AWS, Prometheus, Grafana, Syslog Linux/Windows, Docker, NGINX, Apache Security & Compliance (BSI baseline protection, SIEM/SOC)

• Manage and operate the product data import services for the Otto merchant
• Enhance and maintain the backend systems
• Optimize and maintain AWS infrastructure
• Build a new product data import API
• Design and plan stories and features
• Conduct code reviews to ensure code quality and best practices
• Analyze and fix bugs
• Technologies: Java, Spring Boot, Kafka, AWS, Fargate, Terraform, MongoDB, Mongo Atlas, OpenAPI, GitHub, GitHub Actions, GitHub Copilot, Akhq, Debezium, JUnit, Test Containers, Hexagonal Architecture

• Contributed to the development of the Rubix editorial system
• Implemented various microservices based on Java, AWS S3, AWS SQS, AWS SNS, and Spring Boot, deployed to AWS ECS and AWS Fargate
• Designed and developed AWS Lambdas using TypeScript
• Used PostgreSQL in an AWS RDS Aurora cluster and AWS DynamoDB
• Implemented continuous deployment with GitLab pipelines
• Built an Infrastructure as Code environment with AWS CDK
• Set up and maintained a monitoring platform using AWS CloudWatch
• Developed various frontend components with Vue.js
• Designed the microservice architecture applying Domain Driven Design and GraphQL interfaces

• Operation and further development of the inventory system for booksellers (Quimus). It is an in-house development by Libri that is sold to customers as Software as a Service. The software is developed in an agile way by two developer teams (about 5 developers each). The software consists of around 25 Java microservices that mainly communicate via messaging and share a common Angular frontend. The application runs on Kubernetes in AWS.
• Technologies used: Java 17 & 21, Spring Boot 2 & 3, Hibernate, MySQL, Spring Cloud AWS, Lombok, AWS SQS, AWS SNS, AWS RDS, AWS S3, DynamoDB, Kubernetes, Docker, OpenSearch, Hibernate Search, Liquibase, Gradle, Terraform, Helm, GitLab CI, Keycloak OAuth2, TypeScript, Angular
• My focus until December 2023: Connecting additional POS systems to the inventory system. Connecting the data warehouse for report display. Extending existing features (goods receipts, invoicing, item management, ...). Operations and DevOps tasks.
• Focus from January 2024: Extracting the product search from the inventory system into a global service to use in other applications. Integrating the product search into the booksellers' online shops (also run by Libri). Importing and providing digital items in the product search.

• Developed a greenfield CRM for managing incoming customer requests for a municipal utility provider
• Implemented with PHP/Symfony 5, EasyAdmin, Doctrine ORM and Oracle XE
• Handed over to CiS GmbH after initial groundwork as planned