Florian Kessler

Driving the transformation towards “Everything as code - be it app, infra or ops”.

Hi, we’re Slalom. We’re a purpose-led, global business and technology consulting company. From Strategy to implementation, our approach puts people first. We deeply understand our customers - and their customers - to deliver practical end-to-end solutions that drive meaningful impact. slalom.com/locations/…

Key responsibilities: - Development and management of the “Platform” team and rollout of the container platform - Establishment and management of the “Architecure” team - Driving the transformation towards “Everything as code - be it app, infra or ops”. - Design and implementation of enterprise-wide modules for reuse in productionalised services

DataRobot is a unicorn valued at 6+ billion USD in the hyper-growth stage. Key responsibilities: - Providing AI consulting services during pre- and post-sales stages to the companies (worldwide multinational & startups) from different sectors (manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, insurance, services, retail) - Advising on technical architecture (cloud, on-premises, hybrid), data pipeline implementation/integration, customer enablement, use case implementation - MLOps (ML model operationalization, monitoring, lifecycle management)

At automateops.io I hired, trained and lead highly skilled, highly motivated techies in various customer’s projects, helping the customer to adopt the cloud. I successfully converted the company to a remote-first employer using tools and methodologies I borrowed from software development: stand ups, sprints, document in plain text, version-control everything. With the rise of docker and then kubernetes I made the company focus on the particular needs of developers/customers to get change into production as fast and as reliable as possible.

I wrote my first ever invoice for customers of my parents’ tax office helping them set up an electronic ledger (DATEV) on MS-DOS. Besides school I grew the business to support clients with Windows in the frontend, Windows and Linux in the backend (AD/exchange; samba, sendmail/postfix, lpr/cups) and BSD (pf) on the perimiter. Virtualization brought some sort of sanity to upgrade Windows in the backend (VMware, XEN, later kvm). Automated and fully documented everything there was way before “infrastructure as code” was coined. Hired first staff. Grew a team.