My work at Petro-Logistics
Senior Software Engineer · Jun 2019 - Oct 2021 · Remote, Switzerland
Petro-Logistics is where I operated as a full-stack engineer in the widest sense of the term, owning everything from the public website down to the Linux servers it ran on. Over 2+ years I was the engineer who built the product surface and, at the same time, set up the infrastructure backbone behind it.
On the product side, I built and shipped the company website, owned its updates and deployments, and coordinated a cross-functional team of designers, developers, and content creators. On the infrastructure side, I designed and automated the systems most companies hire a dedicated platform team for: encrypted offsite backups, configuration management, a full observability stack, autoscaling CI, and an internal certificate authority.
Beyond building, I led the requirements research for a new company-wide system, interviewing staff and clients to shape the client- and staff-facing tools, database, and API infrastructure, and kept the toolchain documented so the rest of the team could operate it.
Scope
One engineer, the full stack - from the website to the servers, security, and CI beneath it.
Full-Stack Web
Company website, updates & deployments, coordinating designers, developers, and content creators.
Infrastructure as Code
4 custom Ansible roles provisioning and deploying services across Linux machines.
Observability
Metrics & logs via Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and Promtail.
CI/CD
Autoscaling GitLab Runners infrastructure.
Security & PKI
Private Certificate Authority (smallstep), Go certificate automation, encrypted offsite backups.
Systems & Product
Mail-server migration, requirements research, database & API design, documentation.
Responsibilities & Impact
Built & shipped the company website (petro-logistics.com) - owned its updates and deployments, and coordinated a cross-functional team of designers, developers, and content creators.
Set up an internal PKI - a Public Key Infrastructure with a private Certificate Authority built on smallstep, giving the company self-managed, trusted certificates.
Automated certificate provisioning - wrote a Windows executable in Go that automatically requests and fetches certificates from the CA, removing a manual, error-prone step.
Designed an encrypted offsite backup system - bash scripting + duplicity, with S3 offsite encrypted storage for disaster recovery.
Authored 4 custom Ansible roles to provision and deploy services on Linux machines - reproducible, version-controlled infrastructure.
Built a full observability stack - metrics and logs via Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and Promtail, provisioned end-to-end with Ansible.
Set up autoscaling GitLab Runners - CI infrastructure that scaled runner capacity with demand.
Migrated the company's email to a new mail server, with no loss of accounts or continuity.
Led requirements research for a new company-wide system - interviewed staff and clients to shape the client- and staff-facing tools, database, and API infrastructure.
Improved the company's documentation of its tools and processes, making the toolchain easier for the team to operate.
"Ilias showed great dedication and care in his work. He showed strong organisational and critical-thinking skills, as well as leadership qualities, and is able to work both autonomously and in a team. [...] Ilias carried out his responsibilities to our full satisfaction."
Tech & Tooling
🛠️ Languages & Web
- Go (certificate-automation executable)
- Bash scripting
- Static website build & deployment
⚙️ Infrastructure & CI/CD
- Ansible
- GitLab CI with autoscaling runners
- Linux service provisioning
📊 Observability
- Prometheus (metrics)
- Grafana (dashboards)
- Loki + Promtail (log aggregation)
🔐 Security & Reliability
- Public Key Infrastructure & private CA (smallstep)
- Encrypted offsite backups (duplicity + AWS S3)
- Mail-server migration & administration