Stephan Hesselmann
Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat
Hamburg, Germany
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolStephan Hesselmann is a Principal Software Engineer based in Hamburg with six years of hands-on experience building and hardening cloud-native, container-focused systems. He has progressed through engineering roles at Blue Yonder and Red Hat, now shaping architecture and delivery at Red Hat with a focus on backend and DevOps concerns. His open-source contributions include meaningful work on the widely used StackRox Kubernetes Security Platform—refactoring cluster lifecycle logic, adding policy criteria, and migrating monitoring to Prometheus—demonstrating expertise in observability, telemetry, and secure orchestration. Holding an MS and PhD in Physics from RWTH Aachen, he brings a researcher’s rigor to production engineering and an ability to translate complex system behaviors into reliable, testable code. Colleagues describe him as a pragmatic problem-solver who balances deep technical changes with practical CI/CD and monitoring improvements that reduce operational risk.
6 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Physics, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Physics at RWTH Aachen University
Github Skills (13)
kubernetes10
go10
devops10
protobuffer10
protobuf10
kubernetes-pods10
helm9
prometheus9
container8
testing8
security8
apidoc7
api7
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
stackrox/stackrox
Jan 2022 - Dec 2022
The StackRox Kubernetes Security Platform performs a risk analysis of the container environment, delivers visibility and runtime alerts, and provides recommendations to proactively improve security by hardening the environment.
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:831 reviews, 23 commits, 528 PRs in 11 months
Contributions summary:Stephan contributed to the development of the StackRox Kubernetes Security Platform by refactoring cluster deletion functionality, incorporating environment variables and unit tests. They also added new policy criteria, including replicas and probe definitions, which involved modifications to protobuf definitions, policy printers, and UI elements. Furthermore, the user was involved in migrating monitoring to Prometheus and disabling unnecessary monitoring support in CI, demonstrating DevOps capabilities. The user also added REST dashboard http metrics to Central dashboard and added telemetry options to central CRD.
containerscheckliststackroxsecurityrisk
stehessel/homelab
Nov 2022 - Mar 2025
Contributions:1 review, 19 PRs, 926 pushes in 2 years 4 months
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