Hybrid cloud securities platform in transaction banking

Scope

Platform build-up, team enablement, regulatory automation, AI enablement — four work packages in a BaFin-regulated banking environment.

CI/CD platform & infrastructure

• Designed and implemented a hybrid cloud securities platform with focus on high availability, for uninterrupted service in a critical financial environment.
• Built the platform on AWS, Kubernetes, GitLab and Java, including provider control for production deployment in a data center.
• Designed and implemented the CI/CD solution and testing framework, plus load, performance and end-to-end test infrastructure for developers.
• Optimized the release and incident processes (ITIL) in the BaFin-regulated environment.

AppOps team enablement

• Designed the AppOps operating model and coached the client's new ten-person team through its build-up.
• Implemented the alerting and monitoring infrastructure on Prometheus and Elasticsearch.
• Designed the operation and monitoring of the microservice applications and supported the team in finalizing the operational processes, accelerating delivery cycles.

DORA compliance automation

• Designed and built an automated interface between the USU CMDB and the developer tooling — GitLab, ArgoCD, Kubernetes, Jira, Trivy — to meet the new DORA regulatory requirements.
• Automated the population of the ITIL inventory, including vulnerability data, software versions and deployment artifacts.
• Eliminated manual CMDB maintenance, ensuring continuous audit-readiness.

AI guardrails & secure AI development environment

• Building a central LiteLLM model gateway, MCP servers and a company skills library as the governed foundation for AI-assisted work.
• Engineering firewalled devcontainer sandboxes — a secure environment for developers with controlled network egress.
• Rolling out governed AI-assisted work to developers, POs and business roles — detailed in its own case study.

Technologies: AWS, EKS (Kubernetes), Prometheus, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, Kafka, GitLab, ArgoCD, Java Spring, Terraform, Helm, Trivy, kubecost, USU CMDB

Key Skills Demonstrated

• Hybrid Cloud Expertise: Architecting and running solutions across AWS and on-premises data center environments with a strong focus on high availability.
• Securities Platform Experience: Working inside complex financial platforms and their regulatory requirements (BaFin, ITIL).
• Kubernetes & EKS: Deep Kubernetes knowledge and its implementation on AWS (EKS).
• CI/CD & GitOps: Designing pipelines on GitLab and ArgoCD and optimizing release processes in a regulated setting.
• Test Infrastructure: Load, performance and end-to-end test infrastructure delivered as a service to developers.
• Team Enablement: Coaching the client's new ten-person AppOps team to a working operating model — built to hand over, not to stay.
• Monitoring & Observability: Prometheus and Elasticsearch for alerting, monitoring and proactive issue resolution.
• Regulatory Automation (DORA): Populating CMDB and audit evidence automatically from the delivery toolchain instead of maintaining it by hand.
• Cost Optimization: kubecost for managing and optimizing Kubernetes resource costs.