Gunter Miegel

Work Experience

• Head of IT | HolyPoly | Dresden, Germany

  08/2021 – 11/2024

  Responsible for corporate IT: strategy, infrastructure, services, software development, operations and security

  • Built and led a 5-member remote IT team from the ground up, creating a team with high resilience and self-sufficiency by maximising the psychological safety.
  • Continuous optimization of development and operational methodologies of my team, reducing cycle time by 50% while maintaining high-quality IT support services.
  • Designed software architecture for plastics recycling programs of multinational toy and baby product companies, enabling simple integration of complex reverse logistic processes into customer company websites and time saving check-in of recycled goods return parcels for batch tracing.
  • Developed a Bluetooth-WebSocket bridge service for a handheld X-ray fluorescence device. Accelerating the detection of inorganic impurities in recyclable plastic toys and power tool housings by 200%, necessary to finish projects in-time and empowering corporate clients to make data-driven decisions on recycled plastic usage in new products based on millions of data points.
  • Introduction of ERPNext as Open Source ERP software, streamlining business processes and reducing application and data fragmentation. With adapting ERPNext to cloud-native patterns quick deployment of instances within minutes instead of hours was possible, speeding up business process integration development.
  • Established an IT security baseline with the limited resources of an startup by pragmatically applying Zero-Trust and Security-First security models to software development and infrastructure operations to meet IT compliance requirements by the procurement of global corporations. This enabled HolyPoly to receive orders and revenue by these customers.
  • Responsible for establishing an ISMS to meet internal and business customer IT security and data protection compliance requirements.

• Senior Site Reliability Engineer | Startnext | Dresden, Germany

  11/2019 – 07/2021

  Operations of the crowdfunding platform infrastructure

  • Transformed the legacy PHP crowdfunding application to run on a container-based infrastructure enabling horizontal scaling with seamless platform code roll-outs via CI/CD pipelines. Improving software QA, developer and user experience and time spent by developers for crowdfunding platform updates.
  • Migrated crowdfunding platform storage from NFS to Ceph distributed storage enabling concurrent read and write access. Necessary for horizontal scaling and seamless platform code roll-out.
  • Redesigned the monitoring stack using Telegraf, Loki, InfluxDB, Alertmanager, and Grafana. Leading to reduced operational costs and improved monitoring efficacy while also providing better business intelligence capabilities.

• Coding Instructor | Self-Employed | Dresden, Germany

  08/2019 – present

  Weekly coding courses for 3rd and 4th graders

• Founder and Lead Software Engineer | Coinboot

  08/2017 – 09/2022

  Created Coinboot, an Open Source framework for diskless GPU computing clusters (Video of conference talk)

  • Deployed Coinboot to over 35,000 nodes with 60,000 GPUs in data centers globally. Running immutable and configuratione-drift-free Infrastructure and enabling build-up and operations of GPU computing clusters with minimal TCO, proving that Coinboot is highly efficient.
  • Engineered a lightweight (105 MB) network-bootable diskless Linux image optimized for scalability. Allowing Coinboot to run effectively on thousands of nodes using standard 1 Gbit/s network hardware.
  • Created a user-friendly plugin system enabling customization and different computing workloads without rebuilding the boot image.

• DevOps Engineer | Cloud&Heat | Dresden, Germany

  04/2014 – 10/2019

  Responsible for infrastructure operations, storage migration, and software development

  • Led the planning and development of a mobile GPU container datacenter software stack. Delivering within a few months, securing the company’s future with a two-digit million revenue (Video Link).
  • Automated the setup and configuration of Ceph as unified OpenStack storage backend, replacing the existing OpenStack Swift and GlusterFS setup. Deployed successfully at petabyte scale, providing an optimized setup for heterogeneous disk and rack configurations while reducing complexity and increasing storage performance.
  • Managed OpenStack operations, monitoring, and integration in highly-distributed micro datacenters with efficient waste heat reuse.

• Parental Leave

  11/2012 – 08/2013

• Linux-Systemadministrator | BIT.Group | Dresden, Germany

  06/2010 – 03/2014

  Managed cloud infrastructure for SAP Cloud

• Linux-Systemadministrator | drinet | Dresden, Germany

  09/2009 – 05/2010

  Provided IT support and infrastructure management

Education

• State-certified technician for information and communication technology

  2007 – 2009

  Berufsfachschule für Wirtschaft und Technik des TÜV Rheinland, Dresden, Germany

  15 weeks internship at Schlittermann - internet & unix support

• Mechatronics

  2004 – 2006

  Technical University Dresden, Germany | No degree

• Mechanical Engineering

  2003 – 2004

  University of Applied Sciences Landshut, Germany | No degree

• Abitur (General higher education entrance qualification)

  2000 – 2003

  Berufliches Schulzentrum für Technik Zittau, Germany

Skills and Experience

Languages