Carsten Koester
Principal Infrastructure Engineer at Zscaler
San Jose, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolCarsten Koester is a Principal Infrastructure Engineer with 25+ years of hands-on experience across service provider networks, cloud platforms, virtualization and containerization. He architects and optimizes OpenStack- and Kubernetes-based NFV environments with a strong emphasis on repeatability, automation (Terraform, Ansible, Cluster-API) and network performance at scale. At Cisco he helped grow a two-person prototype into a full-stack platform team, solving uncommon networking needs like multi-network, user-space networking and dual-stack Kubernetes. Equally comfortable down at the hardware/physical layer as in CI/CD pipelines, he combines deep protocol knowledge (MPLS, IPv4/IPv6, DOCSIS, mobile packet core) with pragmatic DevOps leadership and mentoring. Based in San Jose, he pairs this technical career with creative pursuits as a theater lighting designer and is an FAA-certified commercial pilot and flight instructor, reflecting an appetite for complex systems both technical and human.
10 years of coding experience
26 years of employment as a software developer
Computer Science, Computer Science at University of HamburgAbitur, Abitur at Nordsee-Gymnasium Buesum
German, English, French, Dutch, Spanish
Github Skills (58)
network-configuration10
python10
automation10
ansible10
infrastructure-as-code10
devops10
ssh10
bare-metal9
keepalived9
kubernetes-service9
ospf9
arp9
protocols9
bgp9
load-balancer8
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
carstenkoester/wdmx-neopixel
Sep 2023 - Mar 2025
Contributions:15 pushes, 1 branch in 1 year 6 months
carstenkoester/danm
Feb 2020 - May 2020
TelCo grade network management in a Kubernetes cluster
Contributions:29 pushes, 10 branches in 2 months
network-managementgradekuberneteskubernetes-clustercluster
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