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. I have spent twenty years 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. I work 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 the next engineer can live with, 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 with SonarCloud, Trivy and OWASP ZAP runs inside the build, so the audit evidence already exists when someone asks for it.
More on security hardeningNew Relic, Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk. Custom checks and alerts tuned so that a page means something is actually wrong, and bottlenecks show up 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
Every engagement should end with a system your own team can run with confidence once I have left.
Read the estate as it is, not as the diagram claims. Find where the risk, the cost and the manual toil live, and agree on what "done" looks like before changing anything.
Codify it in Terraform, wire it into the pipeline, and put scanning and monitoring around it. Changes go in small, reviewable steps, and 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 · freelance
May 2026 – present
AWS BedrockAthenaIAMCloudTrailTerraformTerragruntGitHub ActionsBackstageGrafanaOIDCIRSALangChainClaude
Senior Cloud Engineer, Developer Experience team · freelance
Oct 2023 – Apr 2026
AWS ECSRDSCloudFrontDynamoDBAPI GatewayTerraformAzure DevOpsKubernetesIstioKeycloakNew RelicPython
Senior Cloud Engineer · freelance
Aug 2022 – Sep 2023
AWS EC2RDSTerraformAnsible TowerDatadogOpenTextPowerShell
Senior Cloud Engineer · freelance
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
This is what I reach for, not everything I have ever opened.
About
I'm Mihai Cindea. I started breaking and fixing computers in the early 2000s and got addicted to Linux almost immediately; a few friends and I ended up building a Slackware-based security distribution. I have looked at infrastructure through a security lens ever since.
The work has moved from remote sysadmin to telecom, and from telecom to cloud and DevOps. The job itself has stayed the same: understand the system, remove the manual steps, and make sure the thing still stands up when it is 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, which has been the normal way of working here since 2020.
I travel regularly for kick-offs, workshops and the weeks when being in the room helps. That covers Utrecht, Noord-Holland, Zuid-Holland, Flevoland and Gelderland:
Remote-first engagements are welcome, and I am used to them: 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.
A distributed team suits the way I work anyway: async-friendly documentation, reviewable infrastructure changes, and pipelines that do not need someone watching them.
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 within comfortable reach of Utrecht (Amsterdam, Amstelveen, Hoofddorp, Schiphol, Haarlem, Hilversum, Almere, Rotterdam, Den Haag, Leiden and Delft), and so are Amersfoort and Apeldoorn to the east. Further afield in the Netherlands works too, usually 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 engagements run in it end to end: standups, documentation, review and handover.