GitLab Experts in Berlin

• Used OpenCode and AI-assisted software engineering to design, implement, refactor, test, and document an end-to-end RAW/SDTM/ADaM pipeline in R for Dr. Falk Pharma (07/2026), including metadata-driven transformations, automated validation rules and QC, traceability, and reproducible clinical outputs.

• Developed complex React/TypeScript frontend systems for highly customizable lens products.
• Designed internal tooling for validating and managing product configuration constraints.
• Led accessibility initiatives to align customer-facing applications with EU accessibility requirements.
• Worked extensively in large legacy codebases while incrementally improving maintainability and developer experience.
• Collaborated across multiple teams in an international e-commerce environment.

• 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

• Mentor team of 6 ML platform engineers through weekly 1:1s, technical design reviews, and best practices, improving team velocity by 35% through structured sprint planning and skill development programs
• Define 2025–2026 ML platform roadmap in collaboration with Data Science, Cloud Engineering, and Product teams, prioritizing automated model governance, cost attribution systems, and multi-environment deployment strategies
• Partner with Data Science, SRE, and Product stakeholders to align ML platform capabilities with business objectives, reducing data scientist deployment friction by 60% through self-service platforms
• Architect and deliver production-grade MLOps platform supporting 50+ models in production with automated promotion pipelines, versioning, and rollback capabilities, achieving 99.5% platform uptime SLA
• Design distributed ML pipeline architecture using Metaflow and Argo Workflows (Vertex Pipelines-compatible), reducing model training time by 30% and deployment cycles from 2 weeks to 3 days through full CI/CD automation
• Build containerized ML services on Kubernetes with auto-scaling policies, resource quotas, and multi-tenancy isolation, optimizing infrastructure costs by $180K annually (25% reduction)
• Implement monitoring, alerting, and performance tracking using Prometheus, Grafana, and custom instrumentation, reducing model debugging time by 50% and establishing model performance SLOs
• Lead development of RAG-based document intelligence platform using LangChain, LangGraph, and vector databases, implementing agentic AI workflows for automated financial document processing
• Implement Infrastructure-as-Code using Terraform for reproducible environment provisioning and GitOps workflows, reducing infrastructure drift incidents by 80%
• Design role-based access control for ML platform, implement model lineage tracking, and establish audit trails for regulatory compliance aligned with enterprise IAM best practices

AI Platform Backend – Senior Developer

Brought in to design and build a backend for an AI platform from scratch, including multi-provider LLM orchestration and real-time infrastructure for AI influencer personas at scale.

Tasks and responsibilities

• Architecture and implementation of a multi-LLM orchestration layer with Semantic Kernel to integrate GPT-4 and other providers for core platform logic and AI influencer personas, reducing model-switching overhead by abstracting provider APIs behind a single interface.
• Design and development of a backend from scratch in C# / .NET 10, including domain modeling with DDD, a versioned RESTful API layer, and cloud infrastructure setup on Azure.
• Built a real-time chat infrastructure with Server-Sent Events (SSE), message persistence, and delivery guarantees for live operation of AI influencer personas at scale.
• Developed a media management service with integration of cloud object storage for upload and retrieval of influencer-generated content.
• Created an integration and unit test suite with data seeding for reliable regression testing across all core platform flows, significantly reducing production error rates.

Tools and technologies: C#, .NET, ASP.NET Core, Python, TypeScript, MySQL, Semantic Kernel, EF Core, Minimal APIs, LLM Orchestration, Prompt Engineering, Agentic AI, Generative AI, AI-Assisted Engineering, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Google Gemini, OpenAI API, Ollama, Redis, Azure, Azure Container Apps, Azure Database for MySQL, Docker, GitHub Actions, Clean Architecture, Vertical Slice Architecture, CQRS, Domain-Driven Design, REST API, xUnit, Integration Testing, Unit Testing, Jira, Confluence, Scrum

• Freelance product owner, scrum master and agile coach in various projects spanning from local agencies to multinational corporations in diverse industries.

• Last projects:

• Adevinta: Technical Project Manager responsible for coordination of several sub-workstreams building the world’s largest classifieds multi-tenant platform.

• Aroundhome (a ProSiebenSat.1 company): Product Manager implementing and verifying on the business side a concept for digital qualification of user requests for matching service providers.

• Peek & Cloppenburg Düsseldorf: Product Manager Mobile advising on and guiding the rebuild of Android and iOS apps.

• Visual Meta GmbH (an Axel Springer company), Berlin: Director Product co-leading the Product & Engineering department together with the Director Engineering.

• Responsibilities at Visual Meta GmbH:

• Define and deliver a 3–5 year horizon product strategy including a product vision & mission connecting to existing company strategy and strategies from adjacent departments.

• Refine an existing OKR process together with OKR master and directors of other departments to increase focus and outcome.

• Support the Director Engineering in creating a platform transformation strategy to transform a monolithic on-premise tech stack into a service-oriented, cloud-based architecture and establish a domain-based organizational setup.

• Accountability for a motivated and talented team of 5 head-level colleagues and 17 operational team members from product management, data and UX/UI design.

• Key achievements at Visual Meta GmbH:

• Defined and delivered a 3–5 year horizon product strategy including a product vision & mission.

• Increased focus within OKR process by moving from 10 company-level objectives to 2 and from several hundred team-level key results to a few dozen.

• Created a career path framework for the product team defining roles and responsibilities from junior to head level positions.

• 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

• Drive migration of enterprise authorization platform from Styra DAS to open-source OPA via Skipper (Zalando's Golang-based ingress proxy) integration
• Optimise k8s resources and integrate native Prometheus metrics with OPA
• Migrate from internal monitoring solution to Prometheus CRs + Dash0

Tech Stack: Java/Kotlin, Golang, Python, Spring Boot, AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, OpenTofu, Prometheus, Grafana

• 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.

• 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.

Tasks: Design and operation of end-to-end cloud data platforms for enterprise clients in publishing and finance, including infrastructure automation, pipeline development, monitoring, and data quality.

Activities:

• Built multi-layer data architectures on Databricks (Apache Spark, Delta Lake), BigQuery, and GCP
• Fully automated cloud infrastructure with Terraform across 3 environments (DEV/STG/PRD)
• Developed automated data pipelines with Python, dbt, and GCP services for different data sources
• Built monitoring and alerting systems for real-time platform monitoring
• Implemented data versioning and quality checks at every layer
• Designed automated test and deployment pipelines in GitLab and Bitbucket

Achievements:

• 2× production data processing capacity, reduced spike response time from minutes to ≤15 s, server errors ≈ 0
• Replaced 3,000 lines of manual configuration with a reusable automation module for 7 customer domains, configuration errors to 0
• Delivered a complete end-to-end data platform at ~€10/month infrastructure cost
• Migrated 7 database tables with 0 downstream issues
• Removed 100% exposed credentials, eliminated external vendor dependency
• Delivered integration of 3 teams in 1 sprint

• IT training in theory and practice for IT specialists in application development and system integration