Scala Experts in Germany

• Short description: Leading a group-wide project to establish standardized cloud governance for Microsoft Azure, including policies, security and compliance controls, automation, and cost and operations management while preserving the autonomy of decentralized business units within regulatory frameworks.

• Tasks and activities:

• Overall responsibility for designing, building, and implementing a company-wide cloud governance structure (Azure), including target picture, roadmap, and operating model.

• Managing internal and external stakeholders (C-level, IT, Security, Compliance, Cloud Architecture, DevOps), including decision and escalation management.

• Planning and facilitating workshops on cloud strategy, governance principles, and the design of areas such as identity, connectivity, and platform management.

• Defining, implementing, and rolling out cloud policies (Azure Policy / custom policies), security standards, and compliance requirements (including GDPR, ISO 27001, BSI C5).

• Building a cloud governance framework based on the Azure Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF), including landing zone and guardrail concepts.

• Introducing automation solutions for governance, security, and cost control (policy/control automation, IaC, CI/CD-based control mechanisms).

• Implementing cloud security and compliance monitoring mechanisms as well as continuous improvement processes.

• Establishing and operationalizing FinOps in an enterprise environment (central and decentralized FinOps teams), including cost management strategies, reporting, and guardrails.

• Integrating governance policies into DevOps processes (e.g. CI/CD principles for security and compliance checks, GitLab Runner concept in spokes, GitLab CI/CD for CAF landing zones).

• Implementing access concepts including RBAC design and breaking-glass mechanisms (emergency access) as well as certificate automation (ACME / step-ca).

• Achievements:

• Created a unified, auditable governance and control set for Azure (policies, standards, compliance mapping) and thus laid the foundation for scalable cloud use in a regulated environment.

• Established repeatable automation for governance, security, and cost control (IaC + CI/CD), reducing manual effort and implementation risk.

• Improved operational and decision-making capability across central and decentralized units (clearer roles, responsibilities, escalation paths, balance between autonomy and group requirements).

• Significantly increased workload compliance during lift-and-shift migrations.

• Technologies used:

• Microsoft Azure Policy, custom policies.

• Terraform, OpenTofu, Terragrunt.

• step-ca (ACME).

• Entra ID.

• Azure Firewall.

• Azure Networking, hub-and-spoke architecture.

• Azure vWAN (evaluation).

• Azure Front Door, Azure Application Gateway.

• Azure ExpressRoute.

• Azure Key Vault.

• NetBox.

• GitLab (on-premises).

• Infrastructure, concepts used:

• Cloud shared responsibility model.

• Hub-and-spoke connectivity / central shared services (from hub-spoke context).

• Central governance with decentralized delivery (business unit autonomy with guardrails).

• Methods used:

• Scrum.

• Stakeholder management (C-level to engineering).

• Cloud governance, Azure Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF).

• DevOps, CI/CD.

• Cost and FinOps approaches: tagging/chargeback models, budget/alert concepts, reserved instances/savings plans vs. on-demand scenarios, sensitivity analyses.

• RBAC, breaking-glass concepts.

• ACME / certificate automation.

• GitLab Runner concept in spokes, GitLab CI/CD pipelines for CAF landing zones.

I designed and developed an AI-powered multi-tenant platform on Azure that transforms SAP process recordings into technical documentation, presentations and automated tests, processing over 15,000 process recordings for enterprise customers like Würth. I owned the architecture, the production releases and the DevOps setup. I also designed a multi-tenant system with SSO and role-based access on Azure. Implemented an MCP Server with Dynamic OAuth Authentication.

Main Tasks:

• Sprint planning and feature preparation
• Design the multi-tenant platform architecture (FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, PostgreSQL row-level security for tenant isolation)
• Develop AI pipelines with Prefect for transcription (Azure Speech API), document generation and SAP screen-recording analysis (Claude, gpt-4-mini)
• Design and implement an MCP server to expose tenant knowledge to LLM clients (Claude), with async retrieval and reranking
• Implement LLM cost tracking, rate limiting and client pooling for Anthropic/OpenAI/Azure OpenAI endpoints
• Set up CI/CD: Docker images to Azure Container Registry, GitHub Actions, Azure Static Web Apps, Alembic migrations in containers
• Manage production releases and execute live data migrations for enterprise customers
• Define engineering standards and architecture patterns for the team

Environment: Azure / Azure Foundry / Python / FastAPI / Prefect / React / PostgreSQL

• 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.

• Support Authorization as a Service initiative for enterprise-scale authorization platform
• Incorporate comprehensive observability solutions into authorization infrastructure
• Provision and manage AWS infrastructure for authorization services
• Mentor development team on AWS and Kubernetes best practices
• Tech Stack: Java/Kotlin, Golang, Python, OPA, Spring Boot, AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, ELK Stack, Prometheus, Grafana

• 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

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.

• It is like a startup within REWE, where we have to build a new forecasting system on Google Cloud Platform from the scratch. Although, officially my role is called MLOps, my actual tasks also include development of data processing pipelines (data engineering) and data scientists tasks such as feature engineering and model trainings.
• GCP: Terraform (tofu), Vertex AI (Kubeflow), Cloud Run, IAM, Google Cloud Storage, BigQuery, Artifact Registry
• Data engineering: Snowflake as the main data warehouse, Terraform, DBT for data model implementations
• CI/CD: GitLab. We have built a CI/CD pipeline that automates deployments of new releases up to production environment

• Designed and implemented Azure Kubernetes Clusters, and managed DNS and Firewall solutions, enhancing network security and reliability.
• Led projects using Agile Scrum methodologies to streamline development cycles and improve project efficiency.
• Fostered and maintained relationships with suppliers to ensure timely project deliverables and resource availability.
• Managed continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipelines using Jenkins, Sonar, GitHub, Bitbucket, and Terraform within the BMW Azure Cloud environment.
• Utilized Fortify SSC and Contrast AST for robust application security testing.
• Directed DevOps engineering initiatives on the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), focusing on streamlining development and deployment processes.
• Service Now governance, risk und compliance (GRC&IRM).

• SAFe Scrum Master for two delivery teams in the payments area
• Successful preparation of the teams for PI Plannings
• Moderation of events and synchronization across team boundaries
• Early identification of risks and blockers and support in removing them
• Structured facilitation of Scrum events using Jira dashboard/Scrum and Kanban board
• Coaching and support of the Product Owner in refinement, building objectives, and managing the product backlog
• Operationalization of the DevOps integration of operations staff into cross-functional teams
• Introduction of a compliance-compliant role and authorization model to meet regulatory requirements
• Collaboration with IAM and business departments
• Facilitation of all Scrum events, continuous process improvement, and handling of impediments

• Datastage 11.7, dbt, Oracle 19, Python 3.12 / PySpark 3.5, Azure GitHub, Azure DevOps, Automic
• Development of migration jobs to transfer data from the collection DWH to the new Risk Mart, as well as development of ETL pipelines to migrate historical data from the old Mart to the new Risk Mart.
• Storage of the silver layer on Hadoop and the gold layer in Oracle.
• Translation of DataStage jobs into dbt to publish reporting data in Google Cloud to a PostgreSQL database.
• Creation and optimization of complex SQL queries for data extraction from a data vault, taking into account historical data in the point-in-time tables.
• Creation of Oracle table definitions (DDL) and adjustment of existing stored procedures.
• Versioning changes in GitHub and deployment via the CI/CD portal.
• Refactoring long-running DataStage jobs into Python using PySpark to reduce server load.
• Migration of SAS scripts to PL/SQL, including new development of distribution functions that have no direct equivalent in Oracle.
• Development of Automic jobs to run DataStage pipelines and Python scripts (PySpark jobs) that control the population of the SME and institutional risk tables in the Risk Mart and perform business calculations.
• Participation in the agile process, including creating user stories, estimations, and planning in Azure DevOps.
• Handling Azure DevOps tickets and close collaboration with testers and business teams for error analysis and resolution.

• 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

• Concept creation and implementing AI Agents in AWS Cloud
• Continuously alignment with stakeholders
• Collaborate with DevOps
• Technologies: Git, CI/CD (GitHub Actions), Python/ML, Streamlit, Deno/typescript, AWS SAM, AWS Bedrock, AWS Lambda, AWS Dynamo DB, AWS S3, AWS Event Bridge etc.

• Testing the SekIDP and related components
• Test design, execution and automation, microservices, GitHub Enterprise, Eclipse, Katalon Test Platform, API Testing, Confluence 8, JIRA/Xray, Draw.io, Swagger/OpenAPI, Postman, Docker, Kubernetes, Podman, PuTTY, E-Health, Telematik, Gematik standards, EPA, E-Rezept, sektoraler IDP, encryption, XaDES, PaDES, DICOM, HL7, FHIR, IHE, ICD, SSO, SAML/Shibboleth, OAuth, smartcards, JWT, two factor authentication Android and iOS, Wireshark, BrowserStack, Cypress, gRPC, REST, SOAP, WS-Security, Linux Shell, PowerShell, SSH/SSL, Java, Kotlin, Cordova, Gradle, Groovy, Python, TypeScript