Ahmed AbdelHalim

Platform Engineer · DevOps
Berlin, Germany

Summary

Platform engineer with 14+ years of experience in software development (backend/API focused), 9+ years in infrastructure automation and DevOps, hobbyist security analyst and tester. An avid fan of automation, sustainability, design patterns, and clean code. Always interested in deriving a better problem-solving method for challenging tasks, and learning sensible new technologies and tools (when the need arises).

Skills

DevOps
Artifactory, Jenkins, Gitlab CI, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible, Helm, Fastly, Vault, ...
Telemetry
Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, ELK, Sentry, Tempo.
Coding
Go, Ruby, Python, Bash, Rust.
Paradigms
Design Patterns, Test Driven Development (TDD), Behavior Driven Development (BDD), Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD), Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Configuration as Code, RESTful APIs, Micro-Services.
Tools
vim, git, tmux, ssh, bash, kubectl, ansible, helmfile, vagrant, docker, certbot, dig, vault, nc, nmap, curl, ffuf, gobuster, sqlmap, xxd, searchsploit, meta-sploit, commix, gdb, ltrace, ...
Platforms
Amazon Web Services (AWS), DigitalOcean, Heroku, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Linux.
Languages
English (Professional), German (Basic), Arabic (Native).

Work Experience

MBition GmbH.

Senior Build Engineer (SRE) Apr. 2023 - Present Berlin, Germany

  • Improved the execution time of the build step from 60+ minutes to be ~6 minutes.
  • Improved the generation of Logical Blocks step time from 90+ minutes to be ~60 minutes.
  • Improvements on pipelines' stability (10% less failures due to pipeline issues).
  • Identified problems with pipeline architecture, and created the project specification for fixing them.
  • Supported other teams on refactoring, and architecting pipelines for better stability/performance.
  • Rewrote parts of the pipeline in golang/Docker to improve performance, stability, and releases LTS.
  • Daily buisness of providing (L2/L3) support for other teams as part of the build enablement team.

Springer Nature AG & Co. KGaA

Platform Engineer Feb. 2022 - Aug. 2022 Berlin, Germany

Worked as part of the Engineering Enablement team, who provides infrastructure, internal tooling, docs, CloudFoundry platform, and Kubernetes clusters, to help the development teams with their daily tasks and provide them with a nice UX. These included:

  • Workin on internal (halfpipe) tooling for building CI/CD pipelines on Github actions and Concourse.
  • Implementing reusable GitHub Actions workflows for deploying to CloudFoundry, Kubernetes, and Docker Registries.
  • Implementing tooling to show and report Kubernetes deployment status (from CI/CD) to respective teams.
  • Implementing alert-routing service, to integrate with Prometheus alert-manager, and sending alerts to different teams/projects, and preconfigured communication channels.
  • Maintaining the team docs used by other development teams, to integrate with and use internal platforms.
  • Maintaining terraform-provisioned infrastructure.

Sapera GmbH.

Senior Developer/DevOps Apr. 2018 - Nov. 2021 Berlin, Germany

  • Implemented infrastructure as code (IaC) for different projects using Terraform and Ansible.
  • Standardized the deployment process (and maintained the process documentation).
  • Built templates to provision infrastructure on different cloud providers and development stages.
  • Built standardized workflows using CircleCI to automate deployments (for internal and external projects).
  • Implemented and maintained the (Rails 5) JSON API serving our infographics portal[1].
  • Maintained 99+% documentation coverage of the infographics portal[1]. API and 90+% test coverage.
  • Worked with Docker to provide deliverables for some of our external projects.
  • Provided support and tutoring to work with our standard deployment workflows (internally and externally).
  • Worked closely with our Systems Engineer to support with various DevOps tasks.
  • Rewrote, maintained and provisioned some of the data pipelines to adhere to a better security standards.

[1] A working version of the infographics portal was acquired by Scrolly Telling GmbH and still worked on by them as seen at Five-Times or Scrlly.

LIQID GmbH.

Senior Backend Developer Mar. 2016 - Dec. 2017 Berlin, Germany

  • Maintained the RESTful API (used by admins and front-end).
  • Implemented and maintained the integration with Deutsche Bank.
  • Implemented and maintained the integration with Intercom CRM.
  • Implemented and maintained the Invoicing system.
  • Implemented the new authentication layer using (RFC7519: JWT).
  • Implemented the Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) for user/client login.
  • Integrated other services like DocuSign, PostIdent,...
  • Implemented day to day business/marketing/technical requirements.

PrioriData GmbH.

Full Stack Developer Jul. 2015 - Feb. 2016 Berlin, Germany

  • Maintained the Rails web (dashboard) app.
  • Optimized the scraping process of getting the data from Apple and GooglePlay stores.
  • Reimplemented the scraping process completely to be 8-10 times faster.
  • Reimplemented the queueing and monitoring around the scrapers for stability.
  • Migrated acquired data from different resources to Google BigQuery.
  • Maintained and provisioned different purpose VM instances on Google Cloud Platform (using chef).

Was acquired by Airnow Data Ltd.

AskNative

Backend Developer/DevOps May. 2013 - Jul. 2015 Remote, Egypt

  • Implemented the test suite for the API.
  • Implemented events booking feature via Stripe.
  • Reimplemented caching for better response times.
  • Maintained the Heroku stacks for staging/production.
  • Reimplemented large portions of the API to follow design patterns.

Projects

Conway's Game of Life

A mono-repo with different command line interface (CLI) implementations for the Game of Life in multiple languages (currently Ruby/Rust), with the automation for publishing updates to different package managers using a git-ish workflow.

Education

B.E. in Computer Science and Engineering

Arab Academy for Science and Technology

GPA 3.1/4.0 (B - Very Good)

Alexandria, Egypt Sep. 2005 - Jan. 2011