Site Reliability Engineering Experts in Germany

• 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.

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

Scope:

• Operation and configuration of the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, including network, storage, and security design.
• Implementation of centralized observability solutions (Prometheus, Grafana, alerting).
• Development of CI/CD pipelines, GitOps workflows, and automation frameworks.
• Training and enablement of operations and development teams.

Result: Accelerated service delivery, transparent operational metrics, and sustainable knowledge transfer.

IT consulting, analysis, architecture design, new and further development, code review, test automation, continuous integration, continuous delivery in backend and frontend areas for Automotive Project Instavalo.

Frontend:

• Implementation of UI components according to specifications, especially style guides and responsive design eith React and Typescript
• Component testing
• Code documentation
• CI/CD with Gitlab Pipeline

Backend / IoT:

• Analysis and architectural design with AWS Greengrass IoT on Edge Devices
• Setting up Microservices containers with Docker Compose on Edge device with AWS Greengrass and AWS IoT IAM, Token Exchange Service, Ansible
• CI/CD with Gitlab Pipeline, Terraform, AWS ECR
• Logging with Fluentbit Lua Language for AWS Cloudwatch
• Python Lambda for AWS Greengrass Recipe deployment on Edge Devices
• Implementation of test-driven development with JUnit, Mockito, and code Coverage
• Jacoco
• Definition of REST interfaces with OpenAPI / Swagger
• Development and enhancement of software based on Java Quarkus, Typescript NestJs NodeJs and Python
• Authentication and authorization in Aws IAM
• Development of REST and gRPC interfaces for the frontend and backend
• Implementation of Maven dependencies with DevSecOps OWASP
• Spring AI, Jetbrains AI Assistant, Junie, Github Copilot, Claude Code, Agents, Skills, Command, Hooks, Subagents

• Co-built a full e-signature and identity verification platform in a two-person team with a senior backend developer, with no designer or PM: all product, UX, and scope decisions made jointly.

Next.js / TypeScript

Advising tech companies and founders on product strategy, customer discovery, AI-powered product development, and product operating models.

• Onboarded and conducted comprehensive documentation and system analysis to assess the existing data infrastructure, facilitating rapid integration and collaboration across functional data teams (modelling, processing, reporting).
• Collaboratively defined the architecture and project structure for a central data pipeline repository, including hierarchical standards, knowledge management strategies, and role-specific responsibilities, enhancing maintainability and onboarding speed.
• Evaluated and validated open-source data routing tools (Airbyte, Apache NiFi, Dragster) for ingest and sync requirements in retail analytics, including local benchmarking and error-state testing.
• Led the design and deployment of Airbyte in Kubernetes, creating customized Helm charts, securing secrets handling, and configuring Ingress with TLS and internal DNS routing, ensuring full API and UI accessibility.
• Troubleshot and resolved Ingress controller issues, iterating through multiple stages of debugging and testing, and documented setup and replication steps for scalable reuse.
• Mapped data models to ARTS standard, supporting schema alignment for ERP and reporting use cases, and coordinated review loops to align future data processing logic.
• Drafted strategic 1-pagers comparing MinIO, Pub/Sub, and routing architectures, providing technical guidance for architectural decisions and investment planning.
• Enabled secure access and authentication mechanisms, including initial evaluation for SAML integration, cluster-level configuration reviews, and service annotation improvements.

• 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

• Drove two cross-functional engineering teams within the SAFe framework to deliver backend and integration solutions for Visa’s Terminal Management and Cybersource Onboarding platforms
• Served as Program Coach for ten teams within the Platform Services organization, advancing Agile maturity, delivery alignment, and a culture of continuous improvement
• Orchestrated Agile ceremonies including Product Manager syncs, metrics reviews, inspect-and-adapt sessions, system demos, and leadership workshops to strengthen transparency, collaboration, and delivery performance
• Championed the rollout of the Re-imagine Work@Visa scaled delivery framework within the Agile Transformation Team, improving collaboration and delivery predictability
• Increased release frequency 18× per quarter by synchronizing distributed teams and developing a comprehensive release guide
• Partnered with the Release Manager to standardize deployments across Visa Data Center, AWS, and Mobile platforms
• Led teams to close all security findings and embed remediation into BAU, achieving zero open issues by mid-2024
• Directed the Security Findings Program across the portfolio, ensuring visibility, accountability, and progress tracking
• Supported the roll out of the OKR framework and led quarterly reviews to align execution with business goals
• Strengthened communication across distributed teams, removed blockers, and advocated for continuous improvement and automation
• Delivered on demand workshops for teams with raising maturity and adoption of best practices
• Co-founded a Center of Excellence and Agile Community of Practice to promote continuous learning and alignment
• Partnered with SRE and InfoSec teams on multi-region rollout and security initiatives to enhance reliability and compliance

• Adaptation, optimization, configuration, and administration of a multi-stage GitLab instance with over 250 users
• Setup, adaptation, expansion, and optimization of infrastructure, configuration, and monitoring
• Provisioning of services and handover to production
• System environment: DependencyTrack, GitLab, Grafana, Hedgedoc, Kubernetes, Oauth2 Proxy, Openstack, Prometheus, Syseleven

Built and operated the entire infrastructure and observability platform for an AI agent evaluation platform on AWS/Kubernetes. Led the evolution of an AI-first cloud-native platform by building end-to-end observability, automating infrastructure and CI/CD, improving reliability and scalability, optimizing performance through data-driven engineering, and operating in an AI-native development workflow centered on rapid iteration, code review, and automation. Tech stack included Terraform, AWS, Kubernetes, Grafana, Github Actions, Python, and Cursor.

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.

• Manage multiple Kubernetes clusters in Production with Ceph as storage layer.
• Implemented CICD pipelines for automating deployments with Gitlab CI
• Terraform for Infrastructure provisioning.
• Claude code
• Helm charts for deploying via ArgoCD
• Implemented automated incident notification pipelines in Kubernetes to align with NIS2 mandatory 24-hour early warning disclosure rules
• Configured Azure Policy and Logging guardrails aligned with BSI IT-Grundschutz (SYS.1.3 / OPS.1.1), ensuring continuous baseline compliance across 50+ cloud workloads

Environment: Gitlab CI, IONOS Cloud, Ceph, ArgoCD, terraform, Elastic cluster, Grafana, Alert Manager & Prometheus

• Linux server migrations: Planning and implementation of the migration with SLES Linux Deployment of VMs in VMware 8.0
• Guiding colleagues in configuring Linux VMs in vSphere Auto Deploy
• Application operations: Ensuring the smooth operation of applications on the migrated servers
• Operations manuals: Revising existing operations manuals, adding to them and creating new ones when required
• Reviewing service offerings: Adjusting and optimizing the service offering of external service providers
• Logistics SW, RedHat Linux, Ansible, Confluence / Jira

• PRISMA project
• Ansible automation
• Windows third-level support for Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows 2013, Windows 2016, Windows 2019