Profile

DevOps engineer who cofounded two companies, worked at Google for 9 years, and then at startups as a DevOps and software engineer.

I have in-depth knowledge of Linux, high-availability and horizontal scaling of on-premise and cloud deployments. I write code in Go and Python primarily.

I enjoy roles where I can gain both deep as well as broad knowledge, and have built up a broad set of skills that way: DevOps/SRE, software engineering, people management, and data engineering.

Experience

The Landbanking Group

Nantes, France (remote)

Senior DevOps Engineer

March 2023-now

The Landbanking Group created www.landler.io, a platform that uses AI to monitor and enable investments in nature.

As the first DevOps engineer, I built and designed the infrastructure for Landler:

  • Auto-scaling infrastructure using AWS and Kubernetes
  • CI/CD using GitHub
  • Monitoring and alerting using Grafana
  • Terraform to manage all configuration

Lixo

Nantes, France (remote)

Senior DevOps Engineer

2022-now

Lixo uses AI to categorize different types of recycables (glass, plastic, cardboard).

As Lixo's first DevOps engineer, I implemented various large improvements in deployment, monitoring, and fleet management. These required changes across several Python codebases: from code instrumentation to writing new services and tools from scratch.

  • Fully automated deployment pipeline: reducing the time to deploy new software releases from hours to minutes
  • Introduced alerting and monitoring of detailed metrics for the services running on the devices
  • Introduced fleet management tools to allow the quickly growing fleet of devices to be managed at scale

Freelance DevOps Engineer

2021-2022

Worked as a freelance DevOps engineer using Kubernetes, Envoy, Google Cloud Platform, Terraform, amongst others.

Agricool

Paris, France

Senior DevOps / Software Engineer

2018-2021

Agricool's on-premise software stack is a microservices architecture built with Go. I primarily worked on the infrastructure part of the software stack, which uses Debian Linux, Ansible, Prometheus, Grafana, Envoy and Docker.

For the business critical sensor data, I designed and created a highly available solution for data collection from IoT sensors using Prometheus, Thanos and AWS.

Implemented the CI/CD for both the on-premise software stack and the software running on AWS. Also created fully automated provisioning of the devices running the on-premise software stack, from OS to application level.

Separately, I dealt with a large, sophisticated attack on our IT infrastructure that lasted several months.

Google

Zurich, Switzerland

Technical Solutions Engineer

2016-2018

Together with with Google Research, I worked on a project to help Google support agents in their support interactions with customers. I was responsible for the pipeline that generated the training data for the machine learning model.

Manager, Technical Solutions Engineer

2014-2016

Manager of a team of Technical Solutions Engineers (G Suite / Google Apps) in Zurich and Dublin.

Technical Solutions Engineer

2009-2014

Developing support tools for G Suite (now called Google Workspace), and supporting both our frontline support team as well as large enterprise customers directly.

Kumina

Eindhoven, The Netherlands

CTO, co-founder

2007-2009

While at Kumina I've designed and implemented solutions for several customers which need highly available, redundant infrastructure: companies from the Netherlands, the UK, Sweden and Denmark.

I also developed several websites, primarily written in Python (with Django and Plone.)

Cidev

Sittard, The Netherlands

CTO, co-founder

2004-2007

I was one of Cidev's two founders and owners. Cidev was a company specialised in supporting open source solutions for small and medium enterprises, mainly for office IT environments: setting up and supporting Samba fileservers, LDAP servers, PostgreSQL & MySQL databases, mail servers, and internal webservers. We also did small scale web hosting and a few programming projects.

Education

Fontys Hogescholen - Eindhoven, The Netherlands

1998-2004, Bachelor, Information Technology

Graduation date: July 2, 2004.

I was active in a students organization for open source enthusiasts called Interlink. From 2001 to 2002 I was part of the Interlink system administration team which maintained the Debian and NetBSD servers hosting the shell accounts, websites, and mail accounts for about 100 IT students.

Bart Cortooms — bart@hiccup.nl