# Stefan Ghiata

> Engineering leader in Amsterdam with 15+ years of shipping production software in banking, insurance and hosting. Has led engineering for a regulated financial platform for 8 years: architecture, delivery, hiring and mentoring. Hands-on with cloud infrastructure, CI/CD and security in DNB/EU-regulated environments. Enthusiastic practitioner of AI agents and local, private LLMs.

- Role: Engineering leader & AI enthusiast
- Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands
- Website: https://ghiata.com
- LinkedIn: https://nl.linkedin.com/in/stefan-g-82933784
- GitHub: https://github.com/ghiata
- Contact: stefan@ghiata.com

## Strengths

- Leads teams end to end: hiring, mentoring, delivery and incident ownership
- Designs for long-term maintainability by scrum-sized teams
- Builds secure software for regulated banking and insurance (DNB, EU, PSD2)
- Automates delivery and infrastructure: CI/CD and infrastructure as code
- Introduces AI agents safely, with human approvals, sandboxing and audit trails
- Runs LLMs locally and privately, sized to the available hardware

## Experience

- **Managing Engineer**, Nationale-Nederlanden (2021–now): Leading engineering for the next-generation pension platform: people, architecture and delivery.
- **Technical Lead**, Nationale-Nederlanden (2018–2021): Built the platform behind every new NN pension product: Vue, Node.js, Lambda, Kinesis and RDS on AWS, all provisioned in CloudFormation. Grew a high-performing team through hiring, training and mentoring.
- **Software Engineer**, ING (2018–2019): Credit-card lifecycle systems: customer-facing Angular + Spring, real-time Kafka streams and batch processing.
- **IT Consultant**, Blue Harvest (2018): Created a cloud-agnostic, turn-key, white-label container orchestration solution on Kubernetes. Spent innovation Fridays building it and mentoring consultants.
- **Software Engineer**, ABN AMRO · via Capgemini (2014–2018): Moved to the Netherlands. Built the software behind ABN AMRO's Corporate Banking website, including iDEAL integration and PSD2.
- **Web Developer**, 1&1 Internet · Bucharest (2010–2014): Help center, fraud-prevention and abuse-handling tools used daily by internal teams. Migrated 5,000+ help articles automatically.

## Skills

- **Languages & frameworks:** TypeScript, JavaScript, Java, Node.js, Spring, Angular, Vue, Astro
- **Cloud & platform:** AWS (Lambda, Kinesis, RDS, EC2), CloudFormation, Docker, Kubernetes, Kafka, Cloudflare Pages
- **Delivery:** GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, Infrastructure as code, Preview environments, Monitoring & incident response
- **AI engineering:** Claude Code subagents & skills, MCP / tool use, Agent sandboxing & permissions, Human-in-the-loop review
- **Local LLMs:** llama.cpp, vLLM, MLX, Ollama, Quantization (GGUF, AWQ, GPTQ), Mixture-of-experts, Memory sizing, Custom inference engines
- **Leadership:** Engineering management, Hiring & mentoring, Agile / Scrum, Stakeholder management

## How he works with AI agents

- Agents get scoped tasks, least-privilege tools and sandboxed workspaces; humans approve scope, previews and merges.
- The agent definitions, release skill and permission rules behind this site are shown on it, in the Crew section: .claude/agents/planner.md, .claude/agents/coder.md, .claude/agents/reviewer.md, .claude/agents/tester.md, .claude/skills/ship-safely/SKILL.md, .claude/settings.json.
- Runs LLMs locally and offline when privacy matters, on NVIDIA, AMD and Apple silicon.

## Outside work

- Traveling (North and South America, Africa, mostly Europe)
- Welding and making things, Minecraft mods, taking hardware apart
- Fishing (catch and release)
- Photography

## Education

- MSc E-Commerce, Bucharest University of Economic Studies (2008–2010)
- BSc Informatics, Bucharest University of Economic Studies (2004–2008)

## Languages

- English (native/bilingual)
- Dutch (professional)
- French (elementary)
- Spanish (elementary)

## Source

This file is generated from the same data as https://ghiata.com and is updated with every deploy.