Professional Profile

As Head of Platform Engineering at Dealroom.co, I lead the teams and technical direction behind our cloud-native platform. We moved from a monolith to microservices on Kubernetes (GKE) and Go, which let us scale services quickly while tightening security through stronger dependency management and supply-chain controls.

Most of my time goes into platform engineering and developer experience: an internal developer platform (IDP) that gives our squads self-service infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines on GitHub Actions and GitOps, so they ship without filing tickets. I own our infrastructure-as-code with Terraform and Crossplane, along with the reliability and observability work that keeps a growing API and data load fast under pressure. Day to day I'm hands-on across Google Cloud and AWS, and a good part of the job is mentoring the engineers who run all of it with me.

I also lead our data platform (Airflow, BigQuery and a Dataplex-governed warehouse on Google Cloud) and two AI platforms we started more recently. The first lets any team build internal tools on Cloudflare Workers without waiting on engineering. The second is a platform for AI agents on GKE, where we run open-source frameworks like OpenClaw and Hermes Agent next to our own Python services. It's still early, but it's already changing how fast the company can get an idea in front of users.

Public Clouds: GCP, AWS
Common tools: Containers, Kubernetes, Helm, Istio, Cilium / eBPF, Serverless, GitHub Actions, Terraform, Pulumi, Crossplane
Data platform: Airflow, BigQuery, Data Warehouse, Dataplex, dbt
AI platform: AI Agents, Agentic AI, LLM orchestration, Model Context Protocol (MCP), LangGraph, CrewAI, OpenClaw, Hermes Agent, Cloudflare Workers
Main languages: Go, Python, JavaScript
Databases: MySQL, Redis, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, RabbitMQ
Methodologies: Platform Engineering, Internal Developer Platform (IDP), GitOps (Argo CD), SRE / Observability, CI / CD, TDD (Test-Driven Development), Microservices, Agile (Scrum or Kanban)
APIs: REST, gRPC/Protobuf, Pub/Sub, GraphQL

Work Experience

Dealroom.co | Amsterdam, NL

March 2025 - Present

Head of Platform Engineering


  • Setting up structured team processes across the organization to cut time-to-deployment and give engineers more autonomy
  • Designing and building the first stages of the internal developer platform (IDP), with standardized self-service tooling so teams ship without waiting on us
  • Rolling out infrastructure as code with Terraform, Crossplane and Argo CD for faster, more repeatable deployments
  • Leading the data platform: Airflow orchestration, BigQuery and the warehouse, with Dataplex for governance
  • Building an AI platform on Cloudflare Workers that lets every team develop internal tools without waiting on engineering
  • Building a GKE-based platform for AI agents that runs open-source frameworks like OpenClaw and Hermes Agent alongside our own Python agents

August 2021 - February 2025

Lead Software Engineer


  • Hiring, coaching and directly managing a team of 6 software engineers (Go/Golang, PHP)
  • Working on the technical roadmap with the product owners and collaborating with other engineering and data squads to enable quick and continuous delivery of a business value
  • Architecture decisions for splitting the monolith into microservices using Kubernetes, custom Helm charts, Istio, gRPC, Protobuf and Pub/Sub, which allowed the company to rapidly scale the business

June 2019 — July 2021

Senior Software Engineer


  • Started as a senior PHP developer, working on a vast MySQL-based monolith in an Agile team
  • Proposed, planned and executed a complete rebuild of infrastructure, from the few boxes running in AWS EC2 to a fully distributed system running on GKE. It proved to be crucial for increasing both data size and API traffic by an order of magnitude in the following years.
  • Introducing and training team members to many new technologies such as Go, Kubernetes, Helm, RabbitMQ and more

SO Connect | Amsterdam, NL

February 2018 — May 2019

Full Stack Engineer


  • Part of Agile (Scrum) team working on Docker-based PHP7 and Node.js microservices
  • Maintaining core codebase based on the FuelPHP and Zend frameworks
  • Successfully developed brand-new marketing product using React / Redux frontend and Laravel Lumen backend, which within a few months became the company's most popular SaaS offering
  • Leading the transition from on-metal deployments to Kubernetes using Helm charts
  • Setting up the serverless framework on AWS with ES2018 functions, webpack and Jest TDD

Cloudflare | London, UK

October 2016 — January 2018

Web Engineer


  • The web security company covered roughly 10% of internet traffic at the time
  • Creating and maintaining PHP APIs with a lot of traffic (1 billion+ req/month)
  • Part of the early discussions and technical tweaks to introduce an upgrade to PHP7
  • Developed WebP API integration with the Cloudflare's edge systems
  • Various improvements to the internal "page rules" engine
  • Working with many technologies such as Docker, Kyoto Tycoon, Redis, etc.
  • Server-side work on the scaling of the PostgreSQL database (primary/replica setup)

babylon health | London, UK

November 2015 — October 2016

Technical Lead


  • Largest doctor-on-demand startup in the UK
  • Heading technical efforts of the Predictive Analytics team
  • Designed and fully implemented the separation of a monolithic codebase to multiple microservices which allowed for a better mobile apps experience for the end user
  • Responsible for the hiring of new engineers i.e., PHP, Python and data scientists
  • Creating development standards and best practices followed across the team
  • Building out the architecture to support the delivery of the AI Predictive Analytics platforms

February 2015 — November 2015

Lead PHP Developer


  • Leading the team of PHP engineers across multiple products
  • Hiring, on-boarding and mentoring engineers to ensure quality and timely delivery
  • Part of the Health Intelligence team responsible for creating AI-based products
  • Successfully implemented ruling algorithm/engine for the medical triage
  • Developing and managing APIs used by millions of iOS and Android devices

LendInvest | London, UK

March 2014 — January 2015

Senior PHP Developer (Symfony)


  • LendInvest is the leading online lender for short-term property finance
  • Transforming legacy code from CodeIgniter to a Symfony2 framework
  • Greenfield project to rewrite P2P lending platform, both borrower and investor portals
  • Creating BDD (Behavior-Driven Development) testing suite using Behat 3
  • Integration of internal system with Amazon S3 storage service
  • Part of the bigger agile team, using lightweight Scrum methodology and some practices from XP
  • Redeveloped systems were successfully launched in December 2014 which enabled the company to eventually lower the minimum investment amount to £1,000

entrago | London, UK

January 2013 - December 2013

Senior Software Engineer


  • Early-stage startup, celebrity channels for fans
  • Rewriting API from Node.js to PHP (Laravel 4.2)
  • Maintaining CMS built on top of Node.js (Hatch.js framework)
  • Working with a sizable Redis database (~100+ GB)
  • Enhancing an analytics system based on the PHP Zend Framework 2 with Predis
  • Development done under agile environment (Kanban)

Primrose | Reading, UK

December 2011 — September 2012

PHP Developer


  • One of the largest UK online gardening retailers
  • Maintained multiple eCommerce systems as part of the Agile team (Scrum)
  • Finding bottlenecks in performance by profiling/debugging PHP code (Xdebug, KCacheGrind) and MySQL queries. As a result, we went from 1600+ SQL queries on each page to less than 400 per page
  • Created a reporting back-end system used for monitoring the buyer accounts
  • Developed custom payment plugin (SOAP) which was successfully deployed on more than dozens of E-Shops around Europe (Docdata Payments)

Infrastructure as a Code (IaC)

I design and run infrastructure as code (IaC), primarily with Terraform and Crossplane, managing Kubernetes and multi-cloud resources declaratively through GitOps.

Terraform 90%
Pulumi 70%
Crossplane 40%

Education

University of Greenwich, London

Bachelor of Engineering (B.Eng.), Software Engineering

1st Class Honours

Public Clouds

My day-to-day runs on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), with hands-on experience across AWS. I architect and operate workloads on managed Kubernetes (GKE), networking, IAM and serverless services on both clouds.

GCP

Experienced, 6+ Years

Certified: Professional Data Engineer (2025)

GCP is my platform of choice. I've spent years deep in GKE, networking and the data stack, and it's where I move fastest. I also like that it's the more niche of the big clouds — I'd rather the internet didn't all run on one provider, so backing a strong alternative fits how I think a healthier, more decentralized web should look.

AWS

Intermediate, 2 years

I'm hands-on with AWS too — EC2, EKS, Lambda and the core networking and IAM — and reach for it whenever a project lives there. GCP just tends to win my preference.

FAQ

Who is Patrik Fuhrmann?

I'm a platform engineering leader based in Amsterdam, currently Head of Platform Engineering at Dealroom.co. I've spent more than a decade building backend and infrastructure, including time at Cloudflare and babylon health in London, and these days I lead the developer, data and AI-agent platforms at Dealroom. I'm a Google Cloud specialist who's just as comfortable writing Go as setting technical direction for a team.

What does a Head of Platform Engineering do?

I run the teams behind several platforms at Dealroom: the internal developer platform (the Kubernetes foundations, CI/CD and tooling our engineers build on), a data platform on Google Cloud (Airflow, BigQuery, Dataplex), and, more recently, platforms for internal tools and AI agents. Most of the job is removing friction, giving teams paved paths so they can ship quickly without cutting corners on reliability or security.

Which cloud platforms and tools does Patrik specialize in?

Google Cloud, mostly. I've spent years on GKE, Go and Python, and I lean on Terraform and Crossplane to run infrastructure as code. I also work across AWS, look after our data stack on Airflow, BigQuery and Dataplex, and I'm building out our AI-agent platform with frameworks like OpenClaw and Hermes Agent. If I had to name one specialty, it's Google Cloud at the platform and data layer.

What is Patrik's experience with Kubernetes, Go and IaC?

I have run production Kubernetes (GKE) for years, build platform services in Go, and manage infrastructure declaratively with Terraform and Crossplane via GitOps.

Where is Patrik based?

I am based in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and work with distributed, cross-functional engineering teams.

What roles is Patrik Fuhrmann a good fit for?

Senior platform and infrastructure leadership: Head of Platform Engineering, Principal or Staff Platform Engineer, or an engineering lead for a team building developer, data or AI-agent platforms. I'm strongest where Google Cloud, Kubernetes and developer experience matter, and where someone needs to set technical direction as well as stay close to the code.

How can I contact Patrik Fuhrmann?

Use the contact form on this site; it goes straight to my inbox. I don't publish an email address, so the form is the best way to reach me. Tell me who you are and what you'd like to discuss, and I'll get back to you.

Is Patrik open to new opportunities?

I am happy to talk about platform engineering, SRE and cloud architecture. The contact form reaches me directly.