Kubernetes Experts in Berlin

• 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.

• 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

Workflow-automation SaaS for operations teams (Berlin, 120 people); full-time freelance engagement reporting to the CEO: an initial 12-month interim mandate, extended twice through the AI build-out; owned product for one squad and coached the other product managers on process.

• Led generative AI (LLM) integration into the core product: from LLM-powered steps to natural-language workflow authoring and step-level automation suggestions, plus AI-managed dynamic workflows, shipped behind eval gates with human-in-the-loop fallbacks: AI-drafted workflows grew to 31% of all new workflows, and median time-to-first-workflow fell from 3 days to 4 hours.
• Packaged the AI capabilities as a usage-based add-on priced on executed automation steps, working with sales and marketing on positioning: ~€800K added ARR in the first year, and adopting accounts churned 1.8 pp less.
• Owned the roadmap end to end: replaced feature-request-driven quarterly planning with an outcome-based rolling roadmap built on quarterly bets and explicit kill criteria, presented monthly to the executive team and quarterly to the board.
• Rebuilt the product-management operating system: weekly customer-discovery cadence incl. workshop facilitation, RFC/decision-doc reviews and a single quarterly metrics narrative; coached four product managers, one promoted to senior during the engagement.
• Closed the engagement as scoped: hired and onboarded the permanent VP Product, handed over the process playbook and roadmap, and exited on schedule in June 2026.

• 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.

• Joined the initial development team and helped transform an n8n prototype into a production-ready 0-to-1 product in a fast-paced environment.
• Owned delivery across CRM and Twilio integrations, customer communication workflows, and administrative interfaces.
• Collaborated on AI evaluation, microservice architecture, and other cross-functional product and engineering topics.
• Supported the CEO across VC communications, customer acquisition, product positioning, onboarding, documentation, pricing, and sales.

• Led migration to GCP using Terraform, GKE, and GitOps, improving deployment consistency and scalability
• Implemented Datadog observability stack via Terraform and datadog-operator
• Established automated end-to-end tests and on-call processes, improving incident response and service reliability
• Migrated from NGINX Ingress Controller to Kubernetes Gateway API (NGINX Gateway Fabric)
• Migrated stateful services (PostgreSQL and Redis) to GCP, improving scalability and operational reliability

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.

• ▶ Built real-time voice assistant (STT → LLM → TTS pipeline) benchmarking and evaluating multiple STT providers including faster-whisper and Azure Speech. achieved sub-3s latency, Groq API (Llama 3) with multi-turn memory - directly handling edge cases in dictation, names and passcode recognition.

• 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

• 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.

• Led the end-to-end delivery of enterprise full-stack web applications by driving requirement analysis, solution design, frontend and backend development, database design, API integration, code reviews, team coordination, Agile execution, CI/CD deployments, production support, performance optimization, security implementation, and stakeholder collaboration to deliver scalable, high-quality software solutions.

• 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.