Carsten Probst

Cleverbridge GmbH (E-Commerce)

Vice President (VP) IT & Infrastructure • Jan, 2023 — present

In this role I am leading Cleverbridge IT & Infrastructure department that consists of internal IT teams, Cloud platform team and operations teams around the globe. Accountable for the IT platform strategy and overseeing budget of the organisation. Transforming the organisation to DevOps methodology, building infrastructure products for cross functional product teams.

cleverbridge AG (E-Commerce)

Senior Director IT Infrastructure • Apr, 2020 — Dec, 2022

In this role I will contribute to the overall IT strategy of cleverbridge and help to shape the future of our IT landscape. I am still leading a team of experts in different continents and I am responsible for the operation of cleverbridge data centers and the e-commerce platform. This role allows me to focus more on the mid to long term objectives and strategies.

cleverbridge AG (E-Commerce)

Global IT Infrastructure Manager • Jul, 2018 — Mar, 2020

At cleverbridge AG, I am leading a global team across two continents and while working on the reorganization of the IT division, I am developing structures and processes that are future-oriented and help the company to put the planned growth on a technologically solid and modern foundation. I am focusing on the IT infrastructure and develop strategies and concepts for the introduction of cloud computing.

Media Ventures GmbH (Venture Capital & Private Equity)

Head of IT • Dec, 2008 — Jul, 2018

After being promoted to Head of IT, my job is mainly to work conceptually and to manage IT projects with clients. I support and advise Media Ventures subsidiaries on technology questions and projects and, prior to any investment, check the applicant’s general technology environment and preexisting conditions as part of the Due Diligence process. I'm also responsible for the smooth operation of the company’s datacenter and the IT services there provided. I manage a team of different engineers, each an expert in his field.

Media Ventures GmbH (Venture Capital & Private Equity)

Sen. System Administrator Operations • Feb, 2008 — Nov, 2008

When neu.de GmbH was sold to the french Meetic Group, I was hired by Media Ventures as a senior system administrator. A major part of my daily business was the remodeling of the datacenter infrastructure from a project based setup to a tenant based setup. This involved a complete rebuild of all datacenter assets and processes as well as a new IP network design.

neu.de GmbH (Online Dating)

System Administrator Operations • Apr, 2007 — Jan, 2008

I was working in the IT Operations department that was responsible for the whole 24/7 operation of the online portal. I was working closely with software developers to optimize performance for high traffic peaks. I was responsible for designing and implementing high availability infrastructure based on Apache Webservers (LAMP stack) with F5 BigIP loadbalancers and MySQL cluster. First POC with Xen virtualization in production.

net mobile AG (Telco)

System Administrator Operations • Aug, 2001 — Mar, 2007

I was working in the IT Operations department as a 2nd level support engineer for the XMS Transport applications. I was responsible for the operation and maintenence of the directory service cluster (OpenLDAP) that was used by several other applications. I was also part of the 24/7 on-call team that was responsible for the datacenter operation during non-business hours.

IT Infrastructure 2.0

Project owner and technical project lead

Business case calculation of various IT operating models (on prem, outsourcing etc.) and development of a new IT architecture for a tailor-made internal software platform. Negotiations with various suppliers and development of an evaluation matrix for decision making under consideration of legal (e.g. GDPR) and compliance aspects (e.g. PCI-DSS or ISAE3402).

Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktop on Azure Cloud

Project owner and project engineer

Planning and rollout of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops on Azure Cloud to deploy and run native Windows applications via web browser.

Consolidation of legacy infrastructure to improve cost/benefit ratio

Project owner and project engineer

Calculating operational costs of legacy systems and developing strategies to improve cost/benefit ratio.

Remodelling infrastructure from project based to tenant/client based setup

Project owner and project engineer

Adapt enterprise infrastructure to fit business needs as business model changes.

Technical Consulting

Project owner

Consulting clients on matters of techn. operation as well as the coordination of requirements between application and infrastructure (DevOps)

Migrating customer data from on-premise applications to SaaS clouds

Project owner and project engineer

Developing processes how to migrate customer data, applications and services to SaaS clouds with zero downtime and managing the migration process.

Achieve carrier/ISP independence

Project owner and project engineer

Requesting an IP network from RIPE and implementing and migration to provider independent (pi) IP space to achieve carrier independence.

Implementing VMware and migration of physical servers

Project owner and project engineer

Building a VMware vSphere cluster, configuration of vSwitches (HA incl. VLANs) and NFS datastore performance optimisation to consolidate ten physical racks to two racks with VMware vSphere nodes.

Central SAN storage

Project owner and project engineer

VMware vSphere needed a shared storage. After testing products of several different manufacturers (EqualLogic, EMC and NetApp) we decided to go with a NetApp FAS system as a fully redundant multi protocol filer (CIFS, NFS, iSCSI), to consolidate distributed DAS systems (mostly EasyRaid and HP MSA). System replaced a classic CIFS filer (FAS ADS integration) while also serving NFS datastores and iSCSI block storage.

F5 BigIP Loadbalancer

Project engineer

To achieve horizontal scale out of application and webservers for our customer projects we implemented load balancing based on high availability F5 BigIP platform. BigIP cluster distributes incoming and outgoing traffic (mostly HTTP/S (with SSL offload) but also other protocols). F5 iRule system allows us redirect and manipulate traffic the way our customer needs it.

Building a Helpdesk and develop associated organisational processes

Project owner and project engineer

Building a Helpdesk infrastructure with 1st and 2nd level support and development of associated organisational processes incl. a 24/7 on-call service.

Implementing Active Directory

Project engineer

Implementation of Microsoft Active Directory as the central directory service for all objects and assets of the enterprise. Implementing single sign on based on ADS for all applications and systems. Rollout of pam_ldap for all Linux systems.

Berufsakademie Düsseldorf

System Engineer (Computer Science) • 2001 — 2003

• Implementing directory services for applications within the XMS Transport environment (Thesis)

Due to good performance, the study could be shortened by one year.

Computer skills (excerpt)

• Unix operating systems (Linux, Solaris etc.)
• Cloud Computing (Azure, CloudFlare)
• HA cluster solutions (MySQL Cluster, Galera Cluster)
• Loadbalancing (F5 BigIP, HAproxy)
• Virtualization (VMware vSphere)
• Storage (NetApp SAN & NAS)
• Monitoring
• Backup
• Orchestration (Puppet)
• Networking (Juniper HA Firewall Cluster, Brocade & Procurve L3 Switche)

Organizational skills

• Team- and Department leadership
• Strategic thinking and implementing strategy
• Decision making and delegation
• PRINCE2 certification

Social skills

• Communication
• Focus on customer needs
• Analytic thinking
• Teamwork

• Vintage computing.
• Computer and video games.
• Books.
• Music on vinyl.