Arik Grahl is a Staff Software Systems Architect living between Berlin and Barcelona and has more than 15 years of experience in full-stack development and operation of infrastructure on bare metal. At the moment he mainly designs cloud native systems and develops Golang applications close to Kubernetes. Furthermore, he is excited about everything evolving around Nix(OS) and enjoys contributing to Nixpkgs.

He studied computer science (BSc. in 2017, MSc. in 2021) at Technical University (TU) in Berlin. During this time he worked on freelance projects as a full-stack developer and supervised the corresponding IT infrastructure.
He also gained experience with co-founding two companies (2014, 2015) during this time with a focus on web development for small and medium-sized companies.

At his former job, he worked as a DevOps engineer where he also had the leading role in developing a mass-market product. He modernized and implemented operations and infrastructure at this company: containerization of all applications, an implementation of a CI/CD infrastructure, the operation of a self-hosted Kubernetes cluster on Bare Metal together with a Gluster and Ceph storage cluster in various locations in Europe, together with state-of-the-art observability stack. In addition, he was also intensively involved in the further training of employees concerning these technologies. Currently, he works as an Staff Software Systems Architect at SysEleven, where he is involved in the design of a cloud native software supply chain management on top of the managed Kubernetes and the development of Golang applications.

He is interested in IT security, data protection as well as network politics, and is an enthusiastic advocate of free and open-source software (FOSS). He is happy to take part in meetups and conferences to exchange ideas about technology. In his free time, he runs numerous services of everyday digital life on a home Kubernetes cluster, passionately cooks vegan food, does strength training, and listens to heavy metal.