Frank Ittermann

Senior Platform Engineer

 | medium.com/@frank.ittermann_46267  | linkedin.com/in/frank-ittermann

Career Profile

Platform engineer with 15+ years of experience designing and operating cloud-native infrastructure, Kubernetes platforms, and distributed systems at scale. Focused on developer productivity, self-service platforms, and site reliability. Creator of engine-ci (container-native CI/CD engine) and DuneBot (GitHub App for automated dependency management). Writes about CI/CD, platform engineering, and developer tooling on Medium.

Experience

Jul, 2024 – present
ContainifyCI
Founder & Open Source Developer
Building CI/CD tooling for container-native development. Projects documented in a 4-part blog series on Medium (12K+ reads).
  • engine-ci — Reduced per-project CI setup from hours to minutes by building a container-native pipeline engine in Go (103 releases, 7 GitHub stars) that runs identically locally and in CI via Docker or Podman
  • DuneBot — Eliminated 10+ hours/week of manual Dependabot PR triage by building a GitHub App (20 releases) that automates approvals and dependency merges
  • Authored a 4-part tech blog series (12K+ reads) documenting the journey from GitHub Actions frustrations, through Dagger.io evaluation, to building engine-ci
  • go-file — Published a Go file abstraction package with lazy initialization, buffer I/O, and test-friendly error injection for simplified file testing
Go (Golang) Zig Shell Docker Podman Goreleaser Trivy GitHub Actions
Mar, 2023 – present
Flink SE
Senior Platform Engineer
Overseeing the production infrastructure of a cloud-native, event-driven platform serving 1M+ users across Europe on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and GCP.
  • Zero-downtime GKE upgrade across 15+ production clusters spanning v1.26 to v1.29 within 3 months, reducing security vulnerabilities by 40% through automated rollout strategies
  • Cut infrastructure provisioning from days to minutes by designing Infrastructure as Code for 200+ GCP resources using Terraform and Config Connector
  • 5x faster deployment velocity for 30+ developers by architecting a self-service platform on Argo CD and Temporal, enabling independent microservice deployments
  • Saved 10+ engineering hours per week by building DuneBot, a GitHub App automating Dependabot PR approvals and dependency merges
  • 50+ daily deployments across dev, staging, and production by engineering CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions and automated quality gates
  • 35% faster incident response through improved Prometheus/Grafana monitoring dashboards and structured on-call runbooks
Go (Golang) YAML Helm Argo CD GCP Config Connector GitHub Actions HashiCorp Terraform SonarQube Temporal Google Cloud Platform Kubernetes (GKE)
Feb, 2022 – Feb 2023
Planetly GmbH
Senior Site Reliability Engineer
Managed AWS and Azure infrastructure for an enterprise-scale carbon management platform. Focused on reliability, cost optimization, and cloud migration.
  • 99.95% platform uptime and 20% cloud cost reduction by managing 50+ AWS resources via Terraform with reserved instance optimization and right-sizing
  • 60% faster infrastructure deployments by designing Terraform CI/CD pipelines with CircleCI and automated provisioning workflows
  • Zero data loss migration of 30+ production workloads from AWS to Azure within 4 months, achieving less than 2 hours total downtime
  • Reduced mean time to detection from 30 minutes to under 5 minutes by integrating Datadog APM with custom alerting thresholds
  • Standardized build environments across 4 development teams by containerizing CI/CD pipelines with Docker
Bash Go (Golang) Python YAML Ansible CircleCI HashiCorp Terraform Azure AWS Kubernetes PostgreSQL
Jan, 2020 – Oct 2021
Data4Life
Team Lead / Senior Site Reliability Engineer
Led a 4-person SRE team for a health-data platform serving 500K+ users. Transitioned from IC to team lead, managing people growth, ISO 27001 compliance, and infrastructure reliability across OpenStack, Kubernetes, and hybrid-cloud.
  • Zero major findings in ISO 27001 re-audit by leading a 4-person SRE team through German BSI certification, implementing compliance controls across the infrastructure stack
  • 95% of planned OKRs delivered on schedule across 3 quarters by defining team roadmap, resource plans, and cross-team dependencies
  • Halved junior SRE onboarding time from 6 to 3 months through structured mentorship program covering tooling, runbooks, and incident response
  • PostgreSQL cluster provisioning cut from 4 hours to 30 minutes by designing automated cluster management with Ansible playbooks
  • Eliminated manual documentation drift across 200+ infrastructure components by building a CI/CD-driven living documentation system for OpenStack resources
  • 25% faster incident resolution by improving Grafana dashboards and alerting rules with SLO-based monitoring
  • Open source contribution: upstream fix to HashiCorp Packer enabling OpenStack Glance image upload skip (merged)
Go (Golang) Bash Python Ansible HashiCorp Packer HashiCorp Terraform HashiCorp Vagrant HashiCorp Vault Jenkins Azure AWS OpenStack PostgreSQL Kubernetes
Feb, 2011 – Aug, 2017
QualityPark — AWIN AG (formerly zanox AG)
Senior Software Engineer
Led migration of core services from legacy C/C++ to Java EE at AWIN (10M+ API requests/month), later developed enterprise requirement management solutions at QualityPark.
  • 10M+ API requests/month served after migrating core services from legacy C/C++ to Java EE platform at AWIN, enabling horizontal scaling and modern CI/CD
  • 5K+ requests/second at peak as technical lead for public REST/SOAP API team, architecting OAuth-based authentication (zanox connect) for 100+ B2B/B2C integrations
  • 60% reduction in legacy system dependency at QualityPark by reverse engineering database access and web service APIs from C/C++ to Java
  • Increased deployment frequency from monthly to weekly by designing CI/CD pipeline with Jenkins and automated testing
Java C++ C C# JavaScript Jenkins Apache Maven Tomcat Oracle Database JBoss 4 memcached MSSQL Hibernate Apache CXF Apache Jersey JUnit

Skills

Cloud & Infrastructure: Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, OpenStack, Cloud-Native Architecture
Container & Orchestration: Kubernetes (GKE, EKS, AKS), Docker, Helm, Argo CD, Kustomize
Infrastructure as Code: HashiCorp Terraform, GCP Config Connector, Pulumi, Ansible, Packer, Vagrant
CI/CD & Automation: GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Jenkins, Travis CI, Dependabot, DuneBot
Programming Languages: Go (Golang), Python, Bash, Java, TypeScript / JavaScript, Zig
Observability & Monitoring: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, ELK Stack
Platform Engineering: Internal Developer Platform (IDP), Self-Service Infrastructure, Developer Experience (DX), Temporal
Security & Compliance: ISO 27001, HashiCorp Vault, Secrets Management, Supply Chain Security
Databases & Messaging: PostgreSQL, MongoDB, MSSQL, Redis / Memcached
Leadership & Mentoring: Team Leadership (4+ person teams), Technical Mentorship, Cross-Functional Collaboration, Roadmap Planning, Agile / Scrum

Education

Diploma, Applied Computer Sciene — Fachhochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin HTW (formerly FHTW), 2001 - 2006