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Project Portfolio

DevOps & Platform Engineering Work (2014-present)

A selection of significant projects spanning cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes platforms, CI/CD automation, and DevSecOps implementations across healthcare, finance, e-commerce, and enterprise sectors.

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Projects Portfolio

Global Enterprise Platform #

IBM • 11/2023 – present

Project Description

Infrastructure automation and observability for a global enterprise platform.

Responsibilities

  • Participated in Puppet to Ansible migration, implementing config-as-code practices
  • Maintain and enhance Ansible Automation Platform
  • Offer support to development teams for Ansible adoption and best practices
  • Design and implement complex Ansible workflows for VM provisioning, security hardening, configuration management, and patching automation
  • Build monitoring solutions using Grafana Cloud and Prometheus for on-premise and Kubernetes environments as part of the observability team
  • Develop Jenkins Job DSL and CI/CD pipelines
  • Create and maintain Ansible playbooks, roles and collections
  • Custom Python automation development

Technologies Used

  • Ansible, Ansible Automation Platform
  • Jenkins, Jenkins Job DSL
  • Grafana Cloud, Prometheus, Dynatrace
  • Kubernetes
  • Azure
  • Red Hat ecosystem (RHEL)

Methodology: Agile

Health Platform #

IBM • 01/2020 – 11/2023

Project Description

Platform for providing health-related services, containing multiple products with hundreds of microservices, tens of environments, and multiple programming languages.

Responsibilities

  • Provide support for the DevOps toolchains
  • Assist developers with dockerfiles and Kubernetes manifests
  • Create, optimize and enhance CI/CD pipelines
  • Work closely with operations and security teams
  • Troubleshoot issues in all environments, including production
  • Design and implement a process for creating and deploying a PXE boot secure bootable OS image
  • Maintain DevOps tools, clusters and resources

Technologies Used

  • IBM Cloud, IBM Kubernetes Service, IBM Container Registry, Cloud Functions, IAM
  • Jenkins declarative pipelines created using Groovy language, shared library and unit tests
  • Ansible and Ansible Tower for deployment pipelines
  • Docker, docker-compose, Helm and Podman for containerization
  • LogDNA, Sysdig for monitoring and alerts
  • Kubernetes and OpenShift for container orchestration
  • ArgoCD and GitOps for deployments
  • Sonatype Nexus as artifact repository
  • SonarQube as static analysis tool
  • Dependency Track and Dependabot for dependency security
  • Hashicorp Vault, Sealed secrets and IBM specific tools for secret management
  • AppArmor, AIDE, Intel SGX, Gramine, AuditD and other tools for security
  • GitHub Actions
  • Programming languages specific DSLs and tools: Gradle, Maven, Conan, npm, Python, Fastlane, Bash

Methodology: Agile

Cryptocurrency Fund Platform #

Freshbyte • 03/2018 – 12/2019 • DevOps Engineer/Architect

Project Description

Cryptocurrency fund platform for a broker agency.

Responsibilities

  • Create the infrastructure in AWS

Technologies Used

  • HA infrastructure was created with Docker in AWS using VPC, ECS, ECR, EFS, ALB and RDS
  • Infrastructure automation was done with CloudFormation and Ansible
  • Autoscaling was implemented based on requests and server loads
  • Zero-downtime deployments were accomplished using CodePipeline for software written in PHP, Node.js, React
  • Custom monitoring was done using CloudWatch
  • Additional security by using AWS Cognito, WAF, Secrets, CloudTrail alerts and Guard Duty
  • On-demand test environments were provisioned with all components

Methodology: Agile

Motor Test Platform #

Freshbyte • 03/2018 – 12/2019 • CI/CD Pipeline Engineer

Project Description

Replaced old monolith desktop motor testing software with microservice containerized web apps.

Responsibilities

  • Create the CI/CD pipelines and dockerfiles

Technologies Used

  • Jenkins declarative pipelines created using Groovy language and maintained/automated by Ansible
  • Dockerfiles and pipelines created for software written in C#, Java and React
  • Create dev environment using docker-compose
  • Test environments created in Azure
  • Zookeeper, Kafka, Keycloak

Methodology: Agile

Wine E-commerce Platform #

Freshbyte • 02/2018 – 02/2019 • DevOps Engineer/Architect

Project Description

Platforms and apps for selling wines.

Responsibilities

  • Create the infrastructure in AWS

Technologies Used

  • HA infrastructure was created in AWS using VPC, EC2, EFS, ALB and RDS
  • Infrastructure automation was done with CloudFormation
  • Autoscaling was implemented based on requests and server loads
  • Zero-downtime deployments were accomplished using CodeBuild and CodeDeploy
  • Monitoring was done using CloudWatch
  • Performance improvements by adding Elasticache and Cloudflare

Methodology: Waterfall

Forex Trading Platform #

Freshbyte • 01/2016 – 02/2018 • DevOps Engineer

Project Description

Trading apps in the financial industry.

Responsibilities

  • Maintain existing infrastructure
  • Create new microservice infrastructure

Technologies Used

  • Existing infrastructure was deployed on VMWare ESXi servers and VMs were managed using VMWare vSphere
  • Configure network switches and SonicWall firewalls, configure site-to-site VPN between multiple datacenters
  • Manage the Windows servers and services: AD, DNS in high availability
  • Manage the bare metal Dell servers using iDrac and ensure physical tape backups are done properly
  • Improve deployment process by adding Jenkins and Ansible to deploy services written in C++, Golang, Ruby, Node.js, PHP
  • Centralized logging using ELK and monitoring done with collectd, InfluxDB and Grafana as well as Shinken, Monit and New Relic
  • Work on the new infrastructure by dockerizing all microservices, creating CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins Groovy pipeline and creating a Kubernetes cluster on bare metal

Methodology: Waterfall

Airline Loyalty Platform #

Freshbyte • 03/2015 – 01/2016 • DevOps Engineer

Project Description

Loyalty solutions for some of the biggest airlines.

Responsibilities

  • Create new dockerized infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines

Technologies Used

  • Using Ansible, Docker and docker-compose to create and manage dev and test environments
  • TeamCity was used for the CI/CD pipelines
  • Centralized logging using ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana). Logstash was eventually replaced with Filebeat
  • Integration with New Relic for application and infrastructure monitoring
  • Performance improvements by configuring Varnish and Redis
  • Security/vulnerability scanning using Nessus

Methodology: Agile

Music Industry Crowdfunding #

Freshbyte • 09/2014 – 03/2015 • DevOps Engineer

Project Description

Fund-raising web-app in the music industry.

Responsibilities

  • Maintain infrastructure
  • Create new infrastructure to handle large amount of traffic

Technologies Used

  • Created a cloud-hybrid (Digital Ocean droplets and Hetzner bare metal combination) deployment environment using Cloudflare, Pacemaker and Corosync to handle high availability and scaling
  • Performance testing using JMeter Apache Benchmark
  • Performance improvements by configuring HAProxy and Varnish servers as proxy
  • Infrastructure automation was done using Ansible

Methodology: Waterfall

Professional Experience #

Senior DevSecOps Engineer

IBM & Freshbyte, Cluj-Napoca (Romania) • 06/2014 – present

Working on large-scale enterprise platforms, leading DevOps and DevSecOps initiatives. Focus on cloud-native infrastructure, Kubernetes ecosystems, CI/CD automation, security hardening, and observability for mission-critical systems supporting hundreds of microservices across multiple environments.

PHP Technical Lead

Freshbyte, Cluj-Napoca (Romania) • 04/2011 – 06/2014

Leading the offshore development team working mainly on loyalty platforms built on top of Magento e-commerce for some of the largest airline companies in the world.

My responsibilities included creating technical specifications, ensuring development is done as per coding standards & guidelines, assigning work to the team, leading the scrum meetings and providing support for developers, testers and business analysts. I was also involved in the internship program, doing the interviews and mentoring the interns.

Apart from the development role, I was also part of the team creating the continuous integration/deployment process, working closely with sysadmins in creating the environments, deployment process and performance tuning. I was also working closely with the QA team, helping to create the automated testing solutions that ensured that bug free systems were being delivered.

Senior Web Developer

Freshbyte, Cluj-Napoca (Romania) • 03/2008 – 04/2011

Working as part of the development team for some of the clients and part of the technical team for most of the projects built on the LAMP stack, I was also taking part in peer-reviewing code and providing technical guidance for the junior members in our team. I also had responsibilities in server administration and managing the requirements and specifications from some of the clients.

Web Developer

Freshbyte, Cluj-Napoca (Romania) • 03/2004 – 03/2008

Working mainly on waterfall projects ranging between simple client presentation websites, up to complex web applications written from scratch.

Career Timeline #

2020 – Present

Senior DevOps / DevSecOps Engineer

IBM

Leading DevOps and DevSecOps initiatives on large-scale enterprise platforms. Focus on Kubernetes ecosystems, CI/CD automation, security hardening, and observability for mission-critical systems.

Kubernetes Ansible Jenkins Grafana
2014 – 2020

Senior DevSecOps Engineer

Freshbyte

Led DevOps transformations across finance, e-commerce, health, and crypto platforms. Built cloud infrastructures, CI/CD pipelines, and containerized microservice architectures.

AWS Docker Kubernetes Ansible
2011 – 2014

PHP Technical Lead

Freshbyte

Led offshore development teams building loyalty platforms for major airlines. Managed technical specifications, coding standards, CI/CD processes, and mentored junior developers.

PHP Magento CI/CD Leadership
2008 – 2011

Senior Web Developer

Freshbyte

Developed enterprise applications on LAMP stack, conducted code reviews, provided technical guidance, and managed server administration.

LAMP Stack Linux MySQL
2004 – 2008

Web Developer

Freshbyte

Developed client websites and complex web applications, working on waterfall projects ranging from presentation sites to full-scale custom applications.

PHP JavaScript HTML/CSS
2009

Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering

Technical University of Cluj-Napoca

Electric Drives and Robotics

Education

Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering

Technical University of Cluj-Napoca (Romania) • 2009

Electric Drives and Robotics

High School Diploma

Avram Iancu High School, Cluj-Napoca (Romania) • 2004

Mathematics and Computer Science