Achim Galeski Profil

Achim Galeski

Boschstr. 5, 56457 Westerburg - +49 (0) 176 55305886 - achim.galeski@gmail.com

Experienced in leading teams of developers, moving businesses into the cloud, scaling e-commerce applications and their infrastructure, streamlining huge content management systems, developing long lifecycle customizations and taming / handling / creating / maintaining commercial & social APIs.

Birthday: 5th June 1983
Languages: German (native), English (fluent)

Recommendations

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"As a wonderful leader and high-skill engineer, Achim enables people to achieve great goals. He leaves a trail of successful products with him by continuously encouraging people to grow and supporting them to implement their innovative ideas. I've worked with Achim for almost 3 years and what really impressed me was his ability to mix technical knowledge, managerial skills, and business orientation. Focused on what matters he was able to manage very complex tasks achieving high-quality results with great teamwork. Very professional and reliable with vast technical knowledge of Software Development. He also has a strong and wide technical basis in different domains like eCommerce solutions, DevOps and AWS. Achim knows how to motivate, empower and grow individuals and teams with his enthusiasm and energy. He is very communicative, and flexible, and creates an atmosphere of continuous learning, motivation, respect, and fun. It was a pleasure to work with an extremely creative person as he can find simple and reliable ways to solve complicated problems. I recommend him without hesitation and would be glad to have the opportunity to work with him in the future!"

Amin Hosseini, Senior Software Developer PHP @ Invincible Brands
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"Achim is one of the most delightful people I had the pleasure of working for in my career. Helpful, supportive, respectful, and a hero for doing the best, a friend to help and a lead to solve. Not only did he have a unique ability to make an incredible team spirit and keeps our team organized, but his constant communication helped lift our spirits in challenging situations. I always mentioned him to others as an impressive lead that makes your situation super comfortable and results in you can solve the problem much easier than you think, exactly like a thoughtful leader, and I was always impressed by his ability to motivate us to reach our full potential and deliver a best possible solution, and he was there until the end. He is also a super-powerful developer and engineer who find the best reliable solution for every issue and he knows and finds what to do in any kinda situation. He has very strong abilities in many developing fields. His ability to coach other team members is something that I will definitely miss. Again, that was my honor to have worked with Achim and highly recommend him."

Mohammad Hadizadeh, Backend Team Lead @ Invincible Brands
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"Achim Galeski is an inspiring, genuine, and hands-on leader. He is the kind that you know would go to bat for you and enjoys getting into the field with his team. He combines leadership so well with experience and deep technical know-how to manage a cross-functional and diverse team. With Achim, you are never standing still, and there are a ton of optimizations to reduce toil, improve automation, and have a lot of fun while doing it. In making decisions, he ensures to get valuable inputs from the team on potential solutions. In my time working with him, he has had an immense impact on my career, and really helped me excel at my work as a Cloud Administrator, and eventually as a DevOps Engineer by clearly defining how my work can align with the business’s goals, and then giving me a great deal of autonomy to get the job done. This level of detail and communication went a long way in getting my work noticed on many levels for various infrastructure improvements on AWS, architecture decisions, and cost optimization strategies that I helped implement. On any given day, Achim can be seen simultaneously driving a ton of different backend, frontend, and AWS cloud infrastructure topics without breaking a sweat. Achim is also 100% committed to getting results and enjoys getting down to solve problems that arise quickly and transparently. He works extremely hard, solves hard problems and pushes for designing solutions that scale beautifully over many users while being not overly complex if they are maintainable, fast, and long-term effective. I recommend him highly!"

John Adedigba, DevOps Engineer @ Fyber
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"I worked with Achim for 4 years, where he not only migrated a formerly static system into the AWS cloud with an automatic vertical and horizontal scaling set up (quite some night shifts were needed for this) to accommodate also hugh traffic spikes, but also developed and set up a safe and secure tech-environment. As (product) partner in crime he developed quite some marketing requested features e.g. all kinds of coupon options, but also catering to customer, operation and customer service needs - all on this fast, precise and with dedication. Furthermore, he is dedicated to setting up and evolving his team catering to any of cultural and technical background."

Anna-Barbara Merkel, Head of Digital Product @ Invincible Brands
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"Achim excels at concisely explaining and implementing technical solutions. Despite humbly referring to himself as a "Backend developer", his extensive knowledge of IT enables him to be equally as effective in DevOps and System Administration roles. He's the rare, sought after breed of Developer who's capable of both swift hot-fixes and meticulously crafted codebases. A pleasure to work with and someone whose feedback and input I always value."

Jordan Warren, Frontend Engineer
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"I had the great pleasure to work with Achim. Beyond being a very pleasant, friendly and brilliant gentleman, strongly rooted into core values, Achim is a real model for professionalism, devotion and loyalty. His primary care is to his customers and his team, he will never hesitate to dig deep into his energy to fulfil his professional and personal commitments. His strong technical skills allow him to provide highly efficient solutions to complex problems, providing therefore piece of mind to all stakeholders. I am very pleased to recommend Achim and will always be delighted to work with him."

Sofiène Kamoun, General Director Strategic Initiatives @ Videotron
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"Achim is one of my most talented and reliable Team Leaders. He has an excellent PHP knowledge and an open solution oriented mind. This helps him to deliver fast and out of the box business solutions for our Enterprise Clients. He is truely customer focused and tries to understand the Sales demands as well. A skill that is quite rare in Developers. He cares for his team and challenges them to be better every day. It is a pleasure to work with him."

Petra Gibboesch, CEO @ PriorMart GmbH

Experience

gridscale GmbH

  • Teamlead PHP

    Updating & Refactoring large existing code base. Implement new monthly billing process. Improve old and build new internal processes. Expand (hire) and build the team further.

InvincibleBrands

  • Director Engineering

    Implemented corporate compliance on infrastructure and code level. Improved lean infrastructure costs. Designed & implemented dedicated remote dev environments.

  • Head of Engineering

    Build up the "dev" team. Established CI/CD workflows. Improved vertical + horizontal scalability of the cloud infrastructure. Implemented countless ecommerce features & customizations.

  • IT Development Manager & PHP Backend Developer

    Established version control. Moved from monolithic server hosting into aws cloud. Designed cloud infrastructure. Implemented autoscaling, database infrastructure, object and page caching.

eKomi - The Feedback Company

  • Manager & Team Lead - Enterprise Development & Support

    Focused on increasing available solutions, maintenance of existing solutions and establishing new enterprise level APIs and backends.

  • Team Lead & Project Coordinator - Enterprise Development & Third Level Support

    While leading and further developing the team and its capabilities and solution libraries, increased efforts of consulting potential new enterprise clients with lead sales managers.

  • Web Developer, Team Lead - Enterprise Implementations & Tech Support

    Scaled the team of devs for enterprise integration. Realized several new 3rd party implementations via API and/or plugins. Established workflow between devs and project managers.

  • Web Developer - Enterprise Implementation & Salesforce

    Established dedicated internal unit for enterprise customer integration. Created first standards for enterprise software implementations. Lead Salesforce customization team.

OC4ALL Limited

  • Founder, CEO

    Management, Product Management, Web Development, Customer Care, Marketing, Service, Logistics

Projects

Some examples:

Remote Dev Environments

To tackle remote work during the pandemic and decrease reliance on individually set up devices, streamlined dev environments were needed.
  • Created CloudFormation templates specific for WordPress frontend, backend, and Symfony developers.
  • Added automatic creation of SSL certificates via AWS Certificate Manager & DNS settings in route 53.
  • Designed a dashboard with a personal login to control the server with start/sleep/restart & monitoring possibilities.
  • Set up restricted individual access via SSH & HTTP through Client-VPN access.
  • Added PhpStorm remote client setup.

Scalable server-side Facebook tracking

Due to Apple's changes in cookie handling, a new server-side tracking for Facebook ads had to be implemented according to Facebook's advice.
  • Created new API endpoints via Route 53 & API Gateway.
  • Added Lambda function in Python to take data and store it in DynamoDB.
  • Developed a Python app to pull all data from DynamoDB, form it to Facebook's needs, and send it in batches.
  • Added feature to the custom WordPress/WooCommerce plugin to gather data about the customer, page visits, and shopping sessions, to send them via AJAX to the API endpoints.
  • Confirmed with performance marketing the results of the new tracking implementation.

Disaster recovery plans and implementation

According to new corporate compliance rules, disaster recovery plans for worst-case scenarios, including cross-region backups to prevent data loss, and to enable in-time recovery, had to be created and implemented.
  • Created a general plan to keep data loss to a minimum and recover within less than an hour.
  • Replicated base VPC set up in a secondary region.
  • Implemented automatic replication of CloudFormation templates, EC2 AMIs, and Aurora DB snapshots to a secondary AWS-Region.
  • Tested, timed, optimized and documented recovery from those cross-region backups.
  • Documented future possibilities to automate disaster recovery via infrastructure/app health-checks and CloudWatch alarms.

Dynamic Bundle product type for WooCommerce

To enable marketing efforts and flexible offers, a new product type called "Dynamic Bundles" had to be implemented. This would allow flexible product-sets with graduated prices based on the set total or the amount of products in the set, which in its size is composed by the customer.
  • Designed a first vision of how such a set should work for the customer and the marketing agent.
  • Implemented the new product type in the custom shop plugin including the design of new tables in the DB and their Repository classes.
  • Created the backend settings for this product type to enable all different combination options.
  • Developed the customer facing UX for this new product type with on the fly price calculation in JavaScript.
  • Implemented cart/order calculation & presentation, re-order support, and order-API implementation for seamless integration with the fulfillment center.
  • Performed several rounds of QA, including support by frontend devs to improve customer UX.
  • Post go-live observations & control, plus feedback rounds with customer service and marketing agents.
This turned out quickly to be the most sold products in the shop.

Skills

Tech stack

  • PHP
  • JavaScript
  • HTML 5
  • CSS
  • Sass
  • Python
  • WordPress
  • NodeJS
  • npm
  • PhpStorm

AWS tech stack

  • Elastic Compute Cloud EC2
  • AWS Auto Scaling Auto Scaling
  • AWS Lambda Lambda
  • Amazon Aurora Aurora
  • Amazon DynamoDB DynamoDB
  • Amazon CloudWatch CloudWatch
  • AWS CloudFormation CloudFormation
  • Amazon API Gateway API Gateway
  • Amazon Simple Notification Service SNS
  • Amazon Route 53 Route 53
  • Elastic Load Balancing ELB
  • Amazon CloudFront CloudFront
  • AWS Client VPN Client VPN
  • Amazon Athena Athena
  • Amazon Simple Storage Service S3
  • Amazon Elastic File System EFS
  • AWS Identity and Access Management IAM
  • AWS Web Application Firewall WAF

LinkedIn Skill Badges

Certifications

Job references