Utrecht · Amsterdam · the Randstad · fully remote across the EU
Codeverse is the independent practice of Mihai Cindea, a freelance cloud and DevOps engineer based in Utrecht. Twenty years of building, automating and hardening infrastructure for online banks, fleet operators and scale-ups — AWS, Terraform, CI/CD and the security work that makes all of it defensible. On-site across Noord-Holland and the Randstad, or fully remote.
Services
Usually one of these is the reason someone calls. Usually two or three of them are the reason the problem existed in the first place.
AWS designs that survive contact with real traffic and real auditors: multi-account layouts, ECS and EC2 workloads, RDS, S3, API Gateway. Legacy estates moved off tin in stages, not in one terrifying weekend.
More on AWS architectureTerraform-first. Click-ops turned into reviewable modules with a state strategy that does not terrify the next engineer, plus Ansible or Puppet for the configuration layer underneath.
More on Terraform workAzure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Jenkins. Pipelines that release safely and predictably, with dependency updates, compliance evidence and ticketing automated instead of nagged about.
More on CI/CD and developer experienceEdge protection with WAF, CloudFront and Shield. Distroless containers. Scanning shifted left into the build with SonarCloud, Trivy and OWASP ZAP — so the audit is a report, not a project.
More on security hardeningNew Relic, Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk. Custom checks and alerts tuned so a page means something is actually wrong — and so bottlenecks surface before your users find them.
More on observabilityA Cisco-certified network background applied to cloud problems: hybrid connectivity, segmentation, MPLS, and VPN estates on pfSense, WireGuard or OpenVPN.
More on network engineeringApproach
I am a contractor, not a dependency. The goal of every engagement is a system your own team can run confidently after I leave.
Read the estate as it actually is, not as the diagram claims. Find where the risk, the cost and the manual toil really live, and agree on what "done" looks like before anything is changed.
Codify it in Terraform, wire it into the pipeline, and put scanning and monitoring around it. Incremental, reviewable changes — production keeps running throughout.
Documentation, modules and runbooks your engineers own. If the handover only works while I'm still on the invoice, the job wasn't finished.
Selected engagements
Senior Cloud Engineer — Developer Experience team
Oct 2023 — present
AWS ECSRDSCloudFrontDynamoDBAPI GatewayTerraformAzure DevOpsKubernetesNew RelicPython
Senior Cloud Engineer
Aug 2022 — Sep 2023
AWS EC2RDSTerraformAnsible TowerDatadogOpenTextPowerShell
Senior Cloud Engineer
Nov 2020 — Aug 2022
Azure DevOpsAWSTerraformDockerSplunkSonarCloudTrivyOWASP ZAP
Senior DevOps Engineer
Oct 2019 — Nov 2020
AWS ECSEC2S3TerraformJenkinsPuppetPrometheusELKTypeScript
Senior DevOps Engineer
Jun 2018 — Sep 2019
LinodePuppetPostgreSQLRedisHAProxyKeepalivedDocker
Automation, telecom data & network engineering
2002 — 2018
Stack
Not a list of everything I have ever opened. This is what I reach for.
About
I'm Mihai Cindea. I started breaking and fixing computers in the early 2000s and got addicted to Linux almost immediately — to the point of building a Slackware-based security distribution with a few friends. Security has stayed the lens I look at infrastructure through ever since.
Since then the work has moved from remote sysadmin to telecom, and from telecom to cloud and DevOps — but the job has never really changed: understand the system, remove the manual steps, and make sure the thing still stands up when it's under load and someone is asking for evidence.
Codeverse is deliberately small. You get the engineer who does the work, not an account manager and a rotating bench.
Working language: English.
Coverage
Utrecht is home, which puts most of the Randstad within an easy commute. Everything that does not need a desk in your building runs remote — that has been the normal way of working here since 2020.
Regular travel for kick-offs, workshops and the weeks where being in the room genuinely helps — across Utrecht, Noord-Holland, Zuid-Holland, Flevoland and Gelderland:
Remote-first engagements are welcome and well-practised — the LeasePlan work was fully remote, and both Knab engagements ran remote or hybrid. I work in the Central European timezone and overlap comfortably with the UK, the Nordics, Iberia and most of the EU.
If your team is distributed, that is not an obstacle to sort out later; it is simply how the work runs. Async-friendly documentation, reviewable infrastructure changes and pipelines that do not need someone watching them are all part of the same habit.
Yes. Most of the last six years has been remote or hybrid, including a fully remote year and a half running SAP OpenText hosting on AWS for LeasePlan. Fully remote engagements anywhere in the EU are fine, and I am equally happy coming on-site for the parts that need it.
The whole Randstad is comfortable from Utrecht — Amsterdam, Amstelveen, Hoofddorp, Schiphol, Haarlem, Hilversum, Almere, Rotterdam, Den Haag, Leiden and Delft — plus Amersfoort and Apeldoorn out east. Further afield in the Netherlands works too, typically as a mix of remote weeks and scheduled on-site days.
AWS architecture and migrations, Terraform and Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD and developer experience, container and cloud security hardening, and observability that produces useful alerts. Teams range from scale-ups with one overloaded platform engineer to regulated enterprises that need the audit trail to hold up.
English. It is the working language of nearly every engineering team in the Randstad, and it is what engagements run in end to end — standups, documentation, review and handover.