About Birkan
Senior Cloud & Platform Engineer with 5+ years running production-grade AWS, Kubernetes, and CI/CD systems - now focused on the operational layer that AI agents need to run safely and reliably at scale.
I help teams take agentic AI from prototype to production: deploying agents and LLM workloads on Kubernetes, building automation pipelines with n8n and MCP, and securing the APIs, tools, and data they connect to. As a Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS), I don't just wire up an agent - I make it observable, cost-efficient, and secure in production.
Backed by 3x AWS and 2x Kubernetes certifications and an MSc in Computer Engineering, I bridge classic platform engineering (Terraform, Helm, FinOps, SRE) with the modern Agentic/LLMOps stack. Having founded a DevOps Community of Practice, I can deliver both the "how" and the "why" to your team.
Turkish
Native or bilingual
English
Native or bilingual
German
Basic
Can work on-site
Cologne (up to 50km), Düsseldorf (up to 10km), Bonn (up to 10km)
Experience
- ambient.digitalCloud EngineerTECHJune 2021 - March 2026 (4 years and 9 months)Cologne, GermanyAt Ambient I was a part of the cloud engineering team responsible for building and maintaining cloud infrastructure for production workloads as well as hosting our internal tooling used by our company. On a day to day basis, I assisted our software developers to overcome their daily CI/CD and Cloud related problems in addition to maintaining our infrastructure. From time to time I provided consultation for cloud infrastructures to external companies as part of our cloud engineering team. Highlights for my current role as follows● Created and maintained high quality infrastructure as code templates for speeding up infrastructure deployments. Deployed and maintained many production systems.● Consistently received extremely positive reviews from our Developers on providing assistance for our daily support work.● Proactively improved and documented processes on internal billing, cost optimization and further improved monitoring systems for better cost visibility.● Launched Devops Community of Practice for hands-on cloud learning labs initiative for developers, devs consistently filled out limited seats for the workshops.
- CognitaStack infrasprint.com sentinelsignal.com-FounderSOFTWARE PUBLISHINGJune 2025 - Today (1 year)Cologne, GermanyI recently founded CognitaStack in einzelunternehmen form in addition to working as a Cloud Engineer at Ambient. I am providing professional Cloud Engineering workshop training to German companies under the infrasprint.com brand. I also have a software product on Steam platform called sentinelsignal.com aiming to assist PC gamers manage their gaming time in order to balance their gaming passion with life's priorities.
- Bestcloudfor.meCloud Native EngineerTECHSeptember 2020 - March 2021 (6 months)In Bestcloudforme I was part of an agile team serving large enterprises to assist with their DevOps workflows as well as designing and building cloud native solutions from ground to up for production environments. Some of highlights for my current position as follows:● Taking responsibility for assisting customers with their daily CI/CD and AWS related problems as well as implementing newly requested features on AWS and on-premise environments.● During my regular implementation/troubleshooting tasks, I spotted a handful of cost optimization opportunities in the AWS environment such as EC2 compute optimizations, unused cloudwatch dashboards and EFS lifecycle misconfiguration that sums up to +$4000/month saving on AWS bill for our customer.● Helped my team to acquire cutting edge know-how for cloud native CI/CD solution named Tekton and build production grade custom Tekton CI/CD pipeline on k8s.● Took responsibility for building end-to-end AI solutions on AWS and achieved proof of concept anomaly detection from IoT sensors.● Continuously spotted and reported technical debt within systems as well as helped to establish documentation for tracking technical debts within our team.DevOps / Kubernetes / Tekton Pipelines / AWS / Jenkins / Amazon SageMaker-Forecast-Quicksight / Python / ECS / EKS / ECR / AWS Lambda / Serverless / Elasticsearch / AWS Cost Optimization
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Education
- MSc in Computer EngineeringUniversity of Arizona2020MSc in Computer Engineering, completed on a full (100%) merit scholarship while serving as a Research Assistant, graduating with a 3.86/4.00 GPA. Coursework centered on the foundations of my current work: Cloud Security, Cyber Security, Systems Cyber Security, Computer Networks, and Applied Machine Learning. My research led to peer-reviewed publications in cloud computing and a thesis on a Federated Cybersecurity Testbed as a Service (FCTaaS).
- BSc in Computer ScienceÖzyeğin University2018BSc in Computer Science, completed on a full (100%) merit scholarship with a 3.50/4.00 GPA. Built strong engineering fundamentals across Data Structures & Algorithms, Object-Oriented Programming (Java), Computer Architecture, Database Management Systems, and Deep Learning. My undergraduate research project - "Little Mapper," a modular 2D-mapping robot - was funded by TÜBİTAK and awarded the Special Jury Prize at the ITU Robot Olympics 2017.
Certifications
- Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist - CKSThe Linux Foundation2024
- AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – ProfessionalAmazon Web Services (AWS)2023