CI/CD & DevEx leadership
Run the entire continuous delivery and developer experience function — hiring and mentoring engineers, roadmap, budget tradeoffs, and the systems that keep hundreds of developers unblocked and shipping.
Independent consulting · principal-level platform work
Architecture for the systems
that ship software.
I’m Andrew Kuhlmann. I lead CI/CD and developer experience end-to-end — people, platforms, and the path from commit to production. Principal-level platform leadership, executed hands-on, fluent in the AI-era toolchain. If it’s technical and it needs to ship, I can build it.
- Years in tech
- 20+
- Org supported
- ~500
- Builds / week
- 50k+
- Team ownership
- CI/CD + DevEx
01 / How I operate
Principal-level ownership, not ticket-taking
I own the full developer platform surface: the team, the architecture, the on-call reality, and the delivery throughput of a large engineering organization. Strategy and hands-on in the same seat.
Modern delivery pipelines
Design self-service CI/CD on current tooling (GitHub Actions and peers), not one-off snowflake jobs. PR checks, artifacts, environments, and promotion paths that scale without heroics.
Cloud-native platforms
Kubernetes, containers, GitOps, and the control planes around them — observability, secrets, progressive delivery, and migrations you can reverse when something goes wrong.
Security & supply chain
Embed SBOMs, signing, scanning, dependency policy, and secrets hygiene into the factory so compliance is continuous — not a quarterly fire drill.
02 / Services
Engagements I take
Spikes, migrations, or multi-month ownership. Tooling is flexible — outcomes matter more than brand logos.
01
Platform engineering & internal developer platforms
Golden paths, self-service environments, templates, and paved roads so product teams ship without opening a ticket for every pipeline.
02
CI/CD modernization
Move off brittle legacy automation onto GitHub Actions (or whatever fits), with reusable workflows, caching, matrix builds, OIDC to cloud, and clear PR feedback.
03
Cloud, Kubernetes & GitOps
Cluster architecture, deploy automation, multi-env promotion, observability (metrics/logs/traces), and reliability practices that survive growth.
04
DevSecOps & software supply chain
Artifact integrity, image and dependency scanning, secrets management, policy-as-code, and release controls that auditors can understand.
05
AI engineering & enablement
LLM-powered features, agentic workflows, RAG, and MCP integrations — plus rolling out AI-assisted development (Claude Code, Copilot) across an engineering org with the guardrails and evals to trust it.
06
Full-stack product engineering
APIs, real-time systems, web clients, automation, Linux and hardware-adjacent work. Fluent across stacks — pick the right language for the problem, then ship it.
07
Staff / principal augmentation
Architecture reviews, firefighting, leading platform teams, or filling the principal gap while you hire. Hands-on and strategic in the same engagement.
03 / Capabilities
Core capabilities
The work I do, in the terms teams hire for — platform, cloud, security, languages, AI, and leadership. Filter to scan quickly.
04 / How I work
Principal engineer. Direct. Results-focused.
Start from the constraint
Deadlines, org politics, legacy systems, compliance — design around reality. Ideal architectures that ignore constraints don’t ship.
Platform over heroics
One paved path beats twenty one-off pipelines. Shared automation scales; tribal knowledge doesn’t.
Tooling is flexible
GitHub Actions, Kubernetes, cloud provider, language — pick what fits the organization. Outcomes first; stack second.
Flexible scope
Architecture, implementation, team leadership, or critical fixes. If it’s technical and the engagement is clear, we can structure it.
05 / Contact
Let’s talk about the system you need built.
Brief note on what you’re shipping, constraints, and timeline. No form maze — just email.
andrew@akuhlconsulting.comAkuhl Consulting · remote / hybrid · US-based