// Infrastructure Architect · Platform Leader · Berlin, Germany
15 years building and leading cloud infrastructure from hands-on architecture to engineering team leadership.
Moving towards engineering leadership — where architectural thinking and organisational impact work at full scale.
Technical Stack
Career
Serving as keylight's principal infrastructure authority — the single technical voice accountable for the entire cloud platform strategy and execution. This isn't operational ownership alone; it's platform leadership in a high-stakes startup context: defining architecture direction, setting security standards from first principles, and driving PCI-DSS and ISO 27001 certification as deliberate business enablers. The compliance work wasn't a checkbox exercise — it was a strategic lever that opened enterprise contracts that would otherwise have been out of reach.
Brought in to define and build Yababa's engineering platform from the ground up — making deliberate technology choices, including an intentional pivot to GCP despite no prior experience with it. Delivered a production-grade Kubernetes platform within six months. Beyond the technical build, owned the full engineering toolchain strategy: drove the migration to GitLab, introduced security-first CI/CD with automated vulnerability scanning, and championed developer experience through feature-branch environments with automatic teardown. Owned the budget, managed vendor relationships, and invested in the growth of a junior engineer — early, clear evidence that I lead people as naturally as I lead platforms.
Owned infrastructure reliability across a portfolio of global consumer brands — Zoosk, EliteSingles, Jdate, and more — serving millions of concurrent users across time zones. Drove the architectural strategy for multi-cluster EKS deployments, established a unified observability layer across all brands using Prometheus and Grafana, and standardised CDN delivery through Akamai. Operating at this scale, across multiple products and engineering teams simultaneously, shaped how I think about platform engineering: as a multiplier for organisational capability, not just a technical concern.
Took full platform ownership for a fast-growing SaaS product serving millions of users — and translated that ownership into organisational outcomes. Drove SOC 2 and ISO 27001 compliance, scaled a continuous deployment pipeline to serve over a hundred enterprise customers without disruption, and stood up a comprehensive observability stack from scratch. Built and led a team of three engineers, defining the engineering culture and tooling standards that the platform still runs on. This role crystallised a conviction: great infrastructure leadership isn't about heroics — it's about building systems and teams that don't need them.
Promoted from Senior Engineer to Lead within twelve months — recognition of both technical depth and an instinct to operate well beyond job description boundaries. Designed and built the AWS SaaS foundation from scratch, drove PrivacyShield and PCI DSS compliance as a business imperative, and demonstrated decisive crisis leadership when HEARTBLEED and SHELLSHOCK broke: full-stack patches shipped within hours of public disclosure, before most organisations had even assessed their exposure. Led a team of five and established the engineering rigour that the company's security reputation was built on.
An early role that established a pattern which has defined the career since: identify what the engineering organisation is missing, and build it. Recognised the absence of infrastructure-as-code practices, championed Ansible adoption, and transformed a manual, error-prone production setup into a consistent, repeatable one. Managed the full stack — from FortiGate firewalls and rack servers to cloud provisioning on Rackspace — building broad foundations that would prove essential at every step that followed.
Where it all began — and where the pattern was set. Made the case for DevOps methodology in an organisation that hadn't encountered it, driving automation across 35 virtual machines through a single Jenkins instance. For a major US telecommunications client, redesigned the delivery pipeline entirely: deployment time dropped from 60 minutes to 3. That outcome wasn't just a technical win — it was an early demonstration that the right platform investment creates compounding returns for the whole engineering organisation.
Consulting
SnapPoints connects merchants to the world's leading loyalty programme networks — a workload that demands high availability, low-latency integrations, and the ability to scale as merchant volume grows. Trusted to own the cloud foundation entirely: designed the architecture, established CI/CD pipelines, and put the security controls in place that gave the team confidence to ship and grow.
1-Click Procurement is building the PayPal equivalent for B2B purchasing — one-click corporate transactions, spend management, and enterprise integrations at scale. A product handling enterprise payments needs infrastructure built to a higher standard: PCI-compliant, locked down, and resilient enough that buyers and suppliers never feel the platform underneath them. Trusted with the architecture to make that possible — designed the cloud foundation and security layer that positioned the product for serious enterprise adoption.
Credentials
Academic Background
Graduated with First Class honours and was recognised as the Best Outgoing Student of the Year 2012 by the Department of Computer Applications — a distinction that set the tone for a career built on rigour, curiosity, and a drive to do the work well.
Let's connect
Whether you have an interesting infrastructure challenge, a role you think I'd be a great fit for, or simply want to talk DevOps — I'd love to hear from you. Drop me a message and I'll get back to you promptly.