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 governed platform for AI agents on GKE — a shared, sandboxed runtime that runs both open-source frameworks (OpenClaw, Hermes Agent) and our own in-house agents built with Pydantic AI, isolated from the production microservices. Together these platforms help teams move from idea to production faster and unlock richer, data-driven product insights.

Work Experience

Head of Platform Engineering Dealroom.co

March 2025 - Present · Amsterdam, NL
  • 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 governed GKE platform for AI agents — a shared, sandboxed runtime running open-source frameworks (OpenClaw, Hermes Agent) and our own in-house agents built with Pydantic AI, isolated from production services

Lead Software Engineer Dealroom.co

August 2021 - February 2025 · Amsterdam, NL
  • Hired, coached and directly managed a team of 6 engineers (Go, PHP)
  • Owned the technical roadmap with product and collaborated across engineering and data squads for continuous delivery of business value
  • Drove the architecture for splitting the monolith into microservices (Kubernetes, Helm, Istio, gRPC, Protobuf, Pub/Sub), letting the business scale rapidly

Senior Software Engineer Dealroom.co

June 2019 — July 2021 · Amsterdam, NL
  • 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

Full Stack Engineer SO Connect

February 2018 — May 2019 · Amsterdam, NL
  • Built and ran containerized PHP and Node.js microservices in an Agile (Scrum) team
  • Maintained and modernized a large legacy PHP codebase
  • Built a new marketing product (React/Redux front end, Laravel back end) that became the company's most popular SaaS offering within months
  • Led the migration from bare-metal deployments to Kubernetes with Helm
  • Set up serverless on AWS (Serverless Framework, webpack, Jest/TDD)

Web Engineer Cloudflare

October 2016 — January 2018 · London, UK
  • Worked at the edge-security company carrying roughly 10% of internet traffic at the time
  • Built and maintained high-traffic PHP APIs serving 1 billion+ requests/month
  • Helped drive a major PHP runtime upgrade for performance
  • Developed the WebP image integration with Cloudflare's edge
  • Improved the internal "page rules" engine
  • Worked across Docker, Redis and high-throughput storage systems
  • Scaled the PostgreSQL database with a primary/replica setup

Technical Lead babylon health

November 2015 — October 2016 · London, UK
  • 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

Lead PHP Developer babylon health

February 2015 — November 2015 · London, UK
  • 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

Senior Software Engineer LendInvest

March 2014 — January 2015 · London, UK
  • At the UK's leading online lender for short-term property finance
  • Migrated a legacy CodeIgniter codebase to Symfony
  • Rebuilt the P2P lending platform (borrower and investor portals) greenfield
  • Built a behaviour-driven (BDD) test suite with Behat
  • Integrated internal systems with Amazon S3
  • Worked in an Agile/Scrum team with XP practices
  • Launched the rebuilt platform in late 2014, enabling the company to lower its minimum investment to £1,000

Senior Software Engineer entrago

January 2013 - December 2013 · London, UK
  • Early-stage startup building celebrity channels for fans
  • Re-platformed the API from Node.js to PHP (Laravel)
  • Maintained a Node.js-based CMS
  • Worked with a large (~100 GB) Redis dataset
  • Enhanced a PHP analytics system on Zend Framework
  • Delivered under an Agile (Kanban) workflow

PHP Developer Primrose

December 2011 — September 2012 · Reading, UK
  • One of the largest UK online gardening retailers
  • Maintained multiple eCommerce systems as part of the Agile team (Scrum)
  • Profiled and optimized PHP and MySQL, cutting page queries from 1600+ to under 400
  • Built a reporting back end for monitoring buyer accounts
  • Developed a custom SOAP payment integration (Docdata Payments) deployed across dozens of EU e-shops

Skills

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.

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
  • OpenClaw
  • Hermes Agent
  • Pydantic AI
  • Cloudflare Workers

Main languages

  • Go
  • Python
  • JavaScript

Databases

  • MySQL
  • Redis
  • PostgreSQL
  • Elasticsearch
  • MongoDB
  • RabbitMQ

Geospatial

  • Geocoding
  • Nominatim (OpenStreetMap)

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

Certified: Professional Data Engineer (2025)

Education

University of Greenwich, London

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

1st Class Honours

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 comfortably with remote and distributed teams across Europe. I have years of experience leading distributed, cross-functional engineering teams across timezones.

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 — in Amsterdam or remotely across Europe. 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.

Can I reach out to Patrik about a role or collaboration?

Always — I'm glad to hear about interesting senior platform or infrastructure work, in Amsterdam or remotely across Europe, and to talk shop about platform engineering, SRE and cloud architecture. The contact form reaches me directly.