Filip Dobrovolny
Verified Expert in Engineering
Back-end Developer
Brno, Czech Republic
Toptal member since September 27, 2022
Filip is a highly experienced solution architect for AWS cloud and a senior Python developer with a diverse skillset in DevOps, infrastructure, and software development. A decade-long track record of delivering complex projects and consulting clients on best practices showcases his ability to design and implement scalable, secure, and efficient solutions. With a passion for innovation and dedication to delivering high-quality work, Filip is a valuable addition to any team.
Portfolio
Experience
- Linux - 15 years
- Python - 14 years
- Python 3 - 14 years
- Git - 12 years
- Django - 12 years
- DevOps - 7 years
- Django REST Framework - 7 years
- AWS Cloud Architecture - 6 years
Availability
Preferred Environment
Linux, Fedora, PyCharm, English, Python
The most amazing...
...project I've worked on is a software emulator for a popular IoT device that serves 18 million users worldwide, which I developed entirely on my own.
Work Experience
CTO | Solution Architect | Full-stack Developer
Fold Pay
- Designed and developed a highly scalable and resilient application architecture using microservices and serverless technologies. Achieved 100-fold on-demand scaling and ensured the reliability of the system.
- Collaborated with customers to identify and implement new features, resulting in improved user experience and increased user acquisition.
- Led the development of a Flutter-based mobile application for ticket checking, resulting in improved customer experience and reduced entry time.
- Directed and managed a team of skilled consultants, ensuring successful project delivery and customer satisfaction.
- Designed and developed an ESP32-based device that efficiently operates turnstiles for ticket checking, resulting in streamlined operations and reduced customer waiting times.
Solution Architect | Full-stack Developer | DevOps Specialist
Freelance Clients
- Constructed a fintech solution using Django REST framework for a prominent local online seller, enabling customers to defer payments on purchases while providing robust fraud prevention measures through real-time screening against bank databases.
- Developed a comprehensive Django-based information system for an educational institution, providing a user-friendly site with Bootstrap and jQuery. As a full-stack developer, I collaborated on the entire development cycle, from design to deployment.
- Developed a Django-based fintech solution for easy paperwork handling and screening of elderly clients for reverse mortgage acquisition in the Netherlands market, with seamless integration of the iDEAL verification system.
- Created an interactive web game utilizing Django to provide engaging and effective requalification courses.
- Developed and deployed a Django-based P2P lending platform, enabling users to invest in loan portfolios and borrowers to access low-interest loans.
- Designed and developed a full-stack information, calibration evidence, and CRM system using the Django framework with a scalable and robust architecture, improving workflow efficiency and streamlining customer management for the organization.
Technical Lead | Senior DevOps Engineer
Sovereign Cloud Stack
- Contributed to the Sovereign Cloud Stack initiative at the container layer, making open-source contributions, conducting code reviews, and actively participating in the community by hosting breakout sessions, presenting team results, and more.
- Led a team of four as a technical lead and team lead, managing timesheets, organizing work, task planning, and analysis. Focused on securing communication between back-end services in an OpenStack environment and customer workloads.
- Made upstream contributions and participated in developing and reviewing technical standards to enhance the security and efficiency of the cloud infrastructure.
Senior DevOps Specialist
Thermo Fisher Scientific
- Administered and maintained the internal Kubernetes cluster for the development and integration testing of products, ensuring smooth and efficient operations.
- Developed Python-based automation utilities to manage and create resources for services in Kubernetes, improving development efficiency and reducing manual errors.
- Provided expert technical consultation on container-based product platform architecture, contributing to the overall success of the project.
- Developed and implemented a GitLab CI/CD pipeline for the automated build, test, and deployment of containerized applications to Kubernetes, reducing manual effort and improving development efficiency.
Industrial Automation Engineer
Freelance Clients
- Upgraded a laboratory hot air sterilizer with Raspberry Pi, enhancing temperature accuracy and automated temperature profile generation for soil testing, reducing error rates.
- Designed and developed IoT devices using Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and ESP32 for an aeroponic farm, utilizing AWS IoT Greengrass and MQTT messaging between devices, increasing efficiency and yield.
- Engineered a semi-automatic beer keg filling hardware solution to streamline the process and minimize waste, resulting in improved productivity and reduced costs.
Senior Python Developer
ČSOB
- Developed a highly scalable Python chatbot using Rasa for a mobile banking application with over 200,000 B2C, B2B, and internal users, resulting in improved customer experience and reduced development costs.
- Reimplemented KBC group functionalities into downstream local market forks, resulting in improved performance, reduced technical debt, and increased agility in development.
- Improved chatbot functionality by implementing the ability to resume the previous conversation, sanitize expired links, and restart from the last state of the dialogue graph, resulting in increased user engagement and retention.
- Developed a tool for visualizing conversation flows as a dialogue graph, enabling more efficient troubleshooting and easier development of new features for the chatbot.
AWS Cloud Solutions Architect
FaceUp
- Designed and executed a comprehensive migration plan from Amazon Lightsail to a container-based high-availability architecture, utilizing IaC techniques, resulting in improved scalability, reliability, and cost optimization for the client.
- Collaborated with development teams to provide expert consultation on best practices in software development, including optimal use of AWS services and CI/CD pipelines, resulting in increased efficiency and faster time-to-market for new features.
- Led the platform security and compliance efforts, including the implementation of necessary security controls, configuration changes, and documentation to prepare for the ISO 27001 security audit and GDPR compliance audit.
- Guided the product architecture development to support future cross-region infrastructure and per-region data retention, ensuring optimal performance, resilience, and compliance with data protection regulations.
- Automated the deployment of Node.js applications to an AWS infrastructure, utilizing GitLab CI/CD, and Terraform, resulting in streamlined and reliable deployment processes for the client's applications.
Senior DevOps Specialist
Thermo Fisher Scientific
- Collaborated with cross-functional teams to advise on multi-regional software distribution solutions for the semiconductor industry, utilizing air-gapped installations, ensuring seamless deployments for end users, and minimizing downtime.
- Designed a complete monitoring solution, leveraging Prometheus and Grafana, to enable the customer to easily track and analyze system performance and identify issues, resulting in increased efficiency and decreased downtime.
- Conducted a comprehensive study on JFrog Artifactory, evaluating its usability against customer use cases and providing valuable insights for the development team to optimize product functionality using JFrog.
- Supported the development team during product release deployment and improved current deployment pipelines, ensuring timely and successful releases and enhancing the overall product quality.
Senior Python Developer
Merkle
- Collaborated on the development of a highly scalable serverless architecture using AWS Lambda and DynamoDB, serving a massive 18 million end-customer IoT devices across the globe.
- Designed and built a sophisticated simulator for hardware devices using Django ORM and REST APIs, enabling accurate testing and development of complex systems. Implemented as a drop-in replacement, seamlessly integrating with existing systems.
- Conducted technical interviews for Python developer positions, assessing skills and identifying qualified candidates for the team.
- Collaborated with technical and non-technical stakeholders to gather requirements and provided technical consulting on software architecture and implementation strategies.
DevOps Specialist | AWS Cloud Solutions Architect
Merkle
- Optimized the caching infrastructure with CloudFront and automatic scaling, conducted load tests, and prepared a backup plan for the customer for a live-stream product launch with 150,000 viewers.
- Provided the solution architecture and cloud migration plans for two projects by designing a container-based, high-availability ECS architecture and DevOps pipelines on Bamboo, migrating from on-premise VPS to AWS, improving scalability and reliability.
- Designed and deployed a highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS for a high-traffic eCommerce website, resulting in improved site performance and customer experience.
- Built and maintained Terraform modules to automate the provisioning and configuration of AWS resources, resulting in faster and more consistent deployments.
- Worked closely with development teams to implement CI/CD pipelines using AWS CodePipeline and CodeBuild, enabling more frequent and reliable releases.
- Developed scripts and automation tools to streamline AWS account management, reducing manual effort, mainly lambda functions to automatically set up CloudWatch alarms and monitor EC2 instances, RDS, and ECS containers.
- Created and managed a load test platform to execute advanced performance and scalability tests on multiple applications and projects.
- Participated in developing a cloud-native solution for video contact centers, leveraging the AWS offering.
Python Developer
Phonexia
- Spearheaded the development of a Python-based biometric voice authentication system for call centers using Django, OpenSIPs, and PostgreSQL from proof of concept (PoC) to minimum viable product (MVP).
- Provided technical leadership by guiding software architecture decisions, work distribution, and REST APIs implementation.
- Streamlined the deployment processes by creating efficient DevOps pipelines and delivering deployable VirtualBox images for end-users.
- Integrated Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana into a centralized logging and monitoring system and a single-node Kubernetes cluster inside a virtual machine.
- Conducted code reviews and mentored junior developers on best practices for Python, Django, and DevOps.
System Engineer
SMART Comp
- Oversaw the on-site operations of three data centers, ensuring optimal functionality and minimizing downtime.
- Provided 24/7 on-call support for an IPTV and internet provider, serving over 100,000 connected customers and resolving issues promptly.
- Designed and optimized the infrastructure architecture to ensure high availability, scalability, and performance.
- Migrated services from virtual machines to bare metal Kubernetes clusters successfully, increasing efficiency and reliability.
- Utilized Prometheus and Grafana to present comprehensive metrics and alerts for the entire infrastructure and Kubernetes services.
- Implemented Netbox for proper datacenter and virtual asset management and IP address management, utilizing a leading solution for modeling and documenting modern networks.
- Streamlined deployment and management processes using automation tools such as Ansible and Ansible Tower.
- Optimized production load and scaling by fine-tuning a Django back end and Go microservices.
- Tested and ensured datacenter failover and geographical redundancy for optimal disaster recovery capabilities.
- Oversaw the network operations center, monitoring alarms and alerts with Zabbix.
Software Engineer
Red Hat
- Developed and maintained Pulp, a software platform for managing software packages that helped users to fetch, upload, organize, and distribute hundreds or thousands of packages. Pulp is used as distribution software for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
- Collaborated with the team to migrate an entire codebase from Python 2.7 to Python 3, and cleaned up legacy code, enhancing the overall performance and maintainability of the software.
- Participated actively in code review and provided constructive feedback to colleagues, which helped maintain a high level of code quality and collaboration.
- Automated the developer's environment using Ansible and Vagrant, which streamlined the development process, reduced errors, and improved productivity.
Experience
Voice Verify Biometric Solution
https://www.phonexia.com/product/voice-verify/The project aimed to integrate an existing voice verification software with OpenSIPS PBX and create a Django-based RESTful API for storage, enrollment of voice samples, and integration with customers' back office software. I was also responsible for DevOps and designing deliverable images with VirtualBox for end-user deployment.
Kuki IPTV
https://www.kuki.cz/Kuki provides a real-time live stream of content from satellite ingestion, a direct stream from TV channel studios, and on-demand content with an in-house built Nginx-based CDN network. I worked as a system engineer with on-call support on building and managing the infrastructure. I was in charge of introducing a new Prometheus-based monitoring solution. I participated in migrating the platform to Kubernetes-based infrastructure and helped optimize the platform for scalability and speed by profiling Django and Go apps and developing optimized solutions.
Skip Pay
https://skippay.cz/I was a back-end developer solely responsible for creating the Django-GDPR library for handling automatic GDPR removal of user-identifiable data and integrating it into the codebase. I handled this project's DevOps, including product release, deployment, and the completed CI/CD.
Oxbridge Admissions
https://oxbridgeadmissions.com/Django-GDPR Open-source Library
https://github.com/druids/django-GDPRPulp Project
https://pulpproject.org/Certifications
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional
Amazon Web Services
Certificate in Advanced English (CAE) | Score 200 | C2
University of Cambridge
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Django ORM, REST APIs, API Development, Amazon API, Django-reversion, Terragrunt, jQuery, FFmpeg, AWS Amplify, Amazon Rekognition, Stripe API, Stripe Connect, Stripe Connect API, Web API
Tools
Docker Compose, Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR), Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), AWS Fargate, Ansible, Git, GitHub, Amazon CloudFront CDN, Amazon CloudWatch, Terraform, GitLab, NGINX, Munin, Sentry, Apache, Amazon Firewall, PyCharm, Travis CI, Amazon EKS, AWS CodeDeploy, Bitbucket, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), AWS IAM, Ansible Tower, Vault, Zabbix, Graylog, Celery, uWSGI, AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeBuild, VirtualBox, ELK (Elastic Stack), Elastic, Logstash, Kibana, Rasa.ai, Bamboo, HashiCorp, Redmine, Keepalived, Grafana, OTRS, RPM, Vagrant, Helm, GitLab CI/CD, CircleCI, Jenkins, MQTT, AWS Key Management Service (KMS), AWS CloudTrail, AWS Systems Manager, Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), AWS Step Functions, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon Athena, Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR), AWS Glue, Amazon AppStream, Amazon WorkSpaces, Amazon Polly, Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Transcribe
Languages
Python, Python 3, Python 2, SQL, XML, C, Bash, C++, Go, HTML, JavaScript, Embedded C, Python Script
Frameworks
Django, Django REST Framework, Swagger, AWS HA, OpenSIPs, Locust, Bootstrap, Sphinx Documentation Generator, Stripes, OAuth 2, Flutter
Paradigms
DevOps, REST, Continuous Delivery (CD), Continuous Integration (CI), RESTful Development, API Architecture, Microservices, Load Testing, Test-driven Development (TDD), Application Architecture, Web Application Architecture, Enterprise Application Architecture, Lambda Architecture, Serverless Architecture
Platforms
Linux, Fedora, Docker, AWS Lambda, Amazon EC2, Amazon Web Services (AWS), AWS Cloud Computing Services, Kubernetes, Debian, Debian Linux, Linux RHEL/CentOS, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, AWS IoT, AWS ALB, Amazon Lightsail, Quick EMUlator (QEMU), Rancher, AWS IoT Core, AWS IoT Greengrass, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS NLB, Amazon, Web, Embedded Linux, OpenStack
Storage
Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Amazon DynamoDB, Databases, JSON, PostgreSQL, Redis, MariaDB, Ceph, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, AWS Snowball, Amazon EFS, Amazon Aurora, Redshift, AWS CodeStar
Other
Open Source, Amazon RDS, ECS, Lambda Functions, Amazon Route 53, AWS DevOps, Serverless, Prometheus, DevOps Engineer, Architecture, RESTful Web Services, RESTful Microservices, AWS Cloud Architecture, Cloud Infrastructure, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Linux Administration, Linux Server Administration, Web Servers, Solution Architecture, Cloud Security, CI/CD Pipelines, AWS Management Console, Cloud, Cloud Architecture, Firewalls, APIs, Video Streaming, Software Architecture, Technical Consulting, Software Implementation, Amazon API Gateway, API Gateways, Troubleshooting, Back-end, Configuration Management, Embedded Systems, English, Web Application Firewall (WAF), Data Center Infrastructure, Streaming, Videos, Video Encoding, System Architecture, Technical Leadership, Internet of Things (IoT), Consul, Cisco UCS, Galera Cluster, JFrog, RPM Packaging, RHEL, Filebeat, Low-level Programming, Full-stack Development, Full-stack, Widevine, MPEG, Digital Rights Management (DRM), Chatbots, Artificial Intelligence (AI), AWS Certified Solution Architect, Cloud Migration, Cloud Services, Direct Connect (DC), AWS VPN, AWS Certificate Manager, Trusted Advisor, Relational Database Services (RDS), DocumentDB, Amazon Neptune, AWS CodePipeline, Pinpoint, AWS Polly, Backups, Stripe Payments, OAuth, Mobile Apps, Native Mobile Apps, Solution Design, Team Leadership, Virtualization, Networking, IPsec, Containers, Containerization, Timesheets, Leadership, Design Leadership, Neutron
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