A software engineer whose career spans application development and, in recent years, cloud-native platform engineering. I build and operate Kubernetes platforms on GCP — Terraform, Argo CD, Helm, GitOps — and bring a long software-engineering background to the infrastructure underneath them. I work system-first and for low entropy: designing for the whole system’s behavior over time, and keeping it predictable, reversible, and self-evident to operate.
Selected experience
Senior Software Engineer · Liferay · 2025–present
Building Liferay’s self-hosted Cloud Native offering on GCP / GKE — a GitOps platform built with Terraform, Argo CD, Crossplane, and Helm, including cross-environment backup/restore and database-identity portability. Also prototyped a Kubernetes operator (Python, kopf) for client-extension orchestration, run on a Docker Compose “Kubernetes-lite” harness that exercises CRD-and-controller patterns — build, reconcile, deploy — without a full cluster. Plus structured-logging and search work, and a RabbitMQ messaging reference implementation built with a team in Budapest.
Senior Software Engineer · Liferay Cloud · 2023–2025
Liferay Cloud PaaS + SaaS on Google Cloud (Kubernetes, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage). Evaluated Cloud SQL performance and implemented support for migrating customers across MySQL and PostgreSQL versions; led a self-service maintenance-page offering; provided deep production support through Cloud log analysis.
Team Lead / Senior Software Engineer · Liferay · 2022–2023
Led and mentored two development teams — set technical direction, reviewed pull requests, enforced standards, ran reviews and OKRs. Delivered full-stack platform projects including a new Marketplace site (Python + headless APIs) and the migration of learn.liferay.com.
Senior Software Engineer · Liferay · 2018–2021
Corporate web platform. Migrated from on-prem VMs to a managed PaaS (AWS, then GCP); built DevOps/build infrastructure (Gradle, Jenkins, Kubernetes liveness probes, Dynatrace); an Elasticsearch + React search experience; SEO and performance work; and platform version upgrades.
Earlier
Front-End Engineer · Liferay GmbH, Germany · 2016–2018 — marketing microsites and an Appcelerator Titanium events mobile app.
SAS-BI Consultant · anaxima GmbH, Germany · 2008–2015 — risk and regulatory reporting for banking (Commerzbank market-risk, Solvency II), and a sales-management reporting platform used by thousands of bank employees.
Independent Consultant · 2002–2008 — C# / .NET, Postscript composition, and Oracle data migration.
Senior Software Engineer / Technical Lead / Instructor · Active Data Corp., Baltimore · 1997–2002 — built database-driven applications (SQLWindows, C/C++, Oracle) and delivered developer training, including a five-day application-development course.
Selected independent work
- Vollrad Kutscher — artist catalog site (Astro, Tailwind, Airtable, GitHub Actions)
- City of Wiesbaden, Germany — city-hall history exhibit (Python, MkDocs, GitHub Actions)
- Ingeborg Lüscher — artist catalog (custom WordPress theme)
- Ilona Surrey — digital fine-art portfolio (WordPress)
Skills
- Platform & infrastructure: Kubernetes, GKE, Terraform, Argo CD / GitOps, Helm, Kubernetes operators (kopf), GCP (Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage), Crossplane, Docker
- CI/CD & operations: GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Dynatrace, Cloudflare, Workload Identity Federation
- Languages: Java, Python, JavaScript / TypeScript, Go
- Also: OSGi, Elasticsearch, Okta SSO / SAML, AWS
- AI: Claude Code, Gemini CLI
- Spoken languages: English and German (fluent)