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Dmytro Horkhover

CV

About

Software Engineer with 14+ years of experience, mostly Java and JVM-based languages such as Clojure and Groovy.

Platform engineer and team lead who designed and built a Kubernetes data platform from an empty repo to production for Ukraine's largest retail group: a 40-node bare-metal cluster plus Azure AKS, GitOps, a signed supply chain, Vault/Keycloak identity, and a multi-tenant Spark/Airflow/ClickHouse stack serving ~45 analytics teams. Led its 3–6-person DevOps/SRE team as team lead and Product Owner while staying hands-on.

AI-native in daily practice: most of my engineering work is delivered through coding agents (Claude Code, Kiro, OpenCode), including merge-request review, Helm chart upgrades and documentation, with me owning the spec, review and verification. Packaged the workflow into skills and CLI helpers shared with the team, cutting the platform's support load enough to move teammates onto feature work.

Background: a decade of backend/JVM engineering on high-load systems, including real-time ad bidding and ML model serving at ~1 ms p99.

Looking for a platform / infrastructure / SRE engineering or engineering-lead role. Product companies and remote preferred, relocation welcome. Currently building an AI-powered bot that automates code review of GitLab merge requests (pre-alpha).

Contacts

Skills

  • Platform & Kubernetes: Kubernetes (RKE2, AKS, EKS), Cilium, ArgoCD / GitOps, Helm, Kustomize, Kyverno, Ansible, Terraform, Bare-metal ops
  • CI/CD & Supply Chain: GitLab CI, TeamCity Kotlin DSL, Docker / BuildKit, cosign, Trivy, Nexus, Jsonnet, Air-gapped mirrors
  • Data Platform: Apache Spark on K8s, Kyuubi, Hive Metastore, Airflow, dbt, ClickHouse, Kafka / Confluent, DataHub, MinIO / S3, Delta Lake
  • Reliability & Observability: Prometheus, Thanos, Loki, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, SLOs, Post-mortems, Runbooks
  • AI-Assisted Engineering: Claude Code (plugins, skills, agents, hooks), Kiro (IDE + CLI), OpenCode, MCP servers, Spec-driven development (OpenSpec, Superpowers), Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, AGENTS.md / agent guidance, LLM code review automation, Plugin evals
  • Identity & Secrets: HashiCorp Vault, External Secrets, Keycloak, OIDC / LDAP / AD, Sigstore
  • Languages: Go, Python, Java / Kotlin / Scala (JVM), Clojure, Bash, HCL
  • Databases & Messaging: PostgreSQL (CloudNativePG), Redis, Kafka, Elasticsearch
  • Cloud: Azure (AKS, Entra ID, ACR, Key Vault), AWS (EKS, S3, IAM), GCP
  • Leadership: Team lead (3–6 engineers), Product ownership, Hiring, PDPs & assessments, Scrum, OKRs

Experience

Team Lead / Senior DevOps Engineer, Data Platform — Fozzy Group (Temabit / Foodtech)

May 2021 – Present · Ukraine-based company, 100% remote

  • Designed and built the group's Kubernetes-based analytics platform from an empty repo to production: a 40-node bare-metal RKE2 cluster (Cilium eBPF, keepalived HA) plus CI-runner, test and Azure AKS clusters, all managed with ArgoCD GitOps from a repository I founded (66 Helm charts, 102 applications).
  • Delivered the multi-tenant data stack (Spark on Kubernetes, Kyuubi, Hive Metastore, Airflow 2/3, dbt, ClickHouse, Kafka/Confluent, DataHub, JupyterHub, Superset) serving ~45 internal analytics teams.
  • Built a 192-drive encrypted MinIO object store with 702 IAM policies as code and identity-based short-lived S3 credentials for every Spark job (Keycloak/AD → STS; custom Kyuubi auth plugin in Scala).
  • Founded and owned the container image supply chain: 122 image variants, Jsonnet-generated GitLab pipelines, multi-arch BuildKit builds, cosign signing, Trivy/SBOM gates, and air-gapped Nexus mirrors of 51 upstream registries.
  • First in the company to manage TeamCity as unit-tested Kotlin DSL (200+ build configs); later executed the TFS/TeamCity → GitLab migration and wrote a GitLab CI template library consumed by ~100 Airflow/dbt/Go/Helm repos.
  • Ran secrets and identity: Vault HA + External Secrets Operator, Terraform-managed tenant model and GitLab token automation for 49 teams; Keycloak SSO across the platform.
  • Built 17 Go microservices for the data platform's infrastructure layer: storage, identity, catalog and observability integrations.
  • Bootstrapped the Azure AKS production data platform (Airflow 3, Workload Identity, ACR, Key Vault) and took it from dev to production in four months.
  • Owned reliability: kube-prometheus-stack/Thanos/Loki/Grafana with 129 dashboards as code, SLO program, 18 post-mortems, including root-causing a recurring Cilium identity-explosion outage and eliminating 88k/week HTTP 503s for BI users.
  • Introduced AI-assisted engineering on the team: repo-level agent guidance with cluster-safety rules and per-chart conventions, and shared AI agent plugins for a spec-driven workflow, from task refinement to specs, plans and ADRs, with delivery tracked in the team's tools.
  • Moved platform support to an AI-agent workflow (Kiro IDE/CLI): agents handle merge-request review, routine Helm chart upgrades and keeping documentation current, with every change human-reviewed. Built a team plugin of agent skills and CLI helpers, covered by evals and compatible with Claude Code, Codex and Cursor. Support work that used to take three engineers now takes about half of my time, so the rest of the team works on new features.
  • Led a 3–6-person DevOps/SRE team as team lead and Product Owner: hiring, PDPs, assessments, scrum ceremonies, OKRs.

Tech: Kubernetes (RKE2, AKS, EKS), Cilium, ArgoCD, Helm, Kustomize, Ansible, Terraform, GitLab CI, TeamCity Kotlin DSL, Docker/BuildKit, cosign, Nexus, Trivy, HashiCorp Vault, External Secrets, Keycloak, MinIO, Apache Spark, Kyuubi, Hive Metastore, Airflow, dbt, ClickHouse, Kafka, DataHub, PostgreSQL (CloudNativePG), Prometheus, Thanos, Loki, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Go, Python, Kotlin, Scala, Bash, Azure, AWS

Senior Java Software Engineer — Grid Dynamics

Oct 2020 – Apr 2021 · Lviv, Ukraine

  • Full-stack engineer on e-commerce services for a major US retail client, with a reactive Java/Spring backend and an Angular frontend.
  • Owned features end to end: API design, implementation, tests, and deployment to the client's Kubernetes cluster.

Tech: Java, Spring Boot, Spring WebFlux / Project Reactor, Angular, TypeScript, Kubernetes, Docker

Full-Stack Engineer — Self-Employed

Jan 2020 – Sep 2020 · Lviv, Ukraine

  • Owned data processing for a retail company's recommendation platform end to end: ingestion, Spark jobs and the admin-console UI.
  • Built and operated a bare-metal Kubernetes cluster from scratch with Ansible playbooks (Alpine, CentOS, Ubuntu nodes) as an R&D project that became the basis for later platform work.
  • Designed and shipped a Telegram scheduling bot backend on Java 11 / Quarkus compiled to a GraalVM native image.

Tech: Java, Go, Python, TypeScript, Quarkus, Spring Boot, Apache Spark, Kafka, Redis, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, Docker, Ansible, Azure Data Lake, Angular, Prometheus, Grafana

Software Java Engineer — N-IX

Aug 2019 – Dec 2019 · Lviv, Ukraine

  • Owned the implementation of a new SMS gateway protocol (SMGP) for a telecom-services client, delivered with extensive unit-test coverage.
  • Drove remediation of security findings from Fortify on Demand and SonarQube across the codebase.
  • Set up a Docker Swarm environment with GitLab, Jenkins and SonarQube on the client's Azure cloud, cutting the vulnerability-fix feedback loop from days to minutes.

Tech: Java 6, Apache Maven, Jenkins, SonarQube, Docker Swarm, Subversion

Senior Java Developer — Intellias

Nov 2018 – Mar 2019 · Lviv, Ukraine

  • Designed and implemented a new map-matching algorithm (Hidden Markov Model + Viterbi) for an automotive navigation client.
  • Delivered a comparative evaluation of map-matching algorithms and refactored the matching pipeline to run multiple algorithms side by side.

Tech: Java 8, Apache Maven, Jenkins, Git (Gerrit)

Software Engineer — LoopMe (via Ciklum until Nov 2015, then in-house)

Jul 2014 – Oct 2018 · Dnipro, Ukraine

  • Core engineer on a high-load digital-advertising platform (ad server, targeting algorithms, real-time-bidding APIs) from the original Clojure implementation through the full migration to Java.
  • Spent ~2 years in the Data Science team owning the Java services that serve prediction and bidding models in production at ~1 ms p99 latency.
  • Awarded "Company Hero" (given once every six months) for single-handedly delivering a difficult cross-language PoC integration.
  • Kept the framework footprint deliberately small, which made the upgrades across Java 8 → 12 low-risk and fast.

Tech: Java (8–12), Clojure, Spring Boot, RxJava, gRPC, Spark, Kafka, Cassandra, PostgreSQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, Clickhouse, Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins, Grafana, Prometheus, Datadog

Junior → Middle Software Engineer — Privat Bank

Feb 2012 – Jul 2014 · Dnipro, Ukraine

  • Developed and maintained the Privat24 internet-banking system (Ukraine, Georgia and A-Bank editions): features, support, bug fixing and unit testing.
  • Single-handedly migrated the Privat24 Georgia project from Java 6 + Ant to Java 7 + Spring + Maven + Git over four weekends.
  • Promoted to middle engineer; owned delivery of internal web applications for the business department, from requirements through production support.

Tech: Java (6–8), JavaScript, Java EE (EJB, Resin), Spring 3, jQuery, Backbone, Angular 1, Sybase, PostgreSQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, Apache Maven, Jenkins

Education

Master of Computer Science — Ukrainian State Chemical Technology University
Sep 2010 – Jun 2011 · Dnipro, Ukraine

Bachelor of Computer Science — Ukrainian State Chemical Technology University
Sep 2006 – Jun 2010 · Dnipro, Ukraine

Languages

  • Ukrainian: Native or bilingual proficiency
  • Russian: Native or bilingual proficiency
  • English: Professional working proficiency
  • Polish: Limited working proficiency
  • German: Elementary proficiency