10/24/2026 updated
60 % partially available
DBA | Platform Engineer skilled in AWS, Typescript, Datadog, EKS, Dataiku, SQL Server & PostgreSQL
Nowy Tomysl, Poland
Worldwide
Bachelor of Commerce / PgDipCom (Information Science)About me
Senior Platform & Database Reliability Engineer with 15+ years across on-premise and cloud. I run the layer most teams only notice when it breaks: databases, Kubernetes/AWS infrastructure, and the observability that tells you what is actually happening before a user does.
Amazon DynamoDBPostgreSQLDatabase EnginesAWS CDKCloud Platform SystemSnowflakeAWS AuroraAWS EKS
Asher Rankin
Database and platform engineer based in Ostrobothnia, Finland.
I've worked in IT since 2012. I started as a DBA and moved over time into cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes and data platforms. Most of my work is at the infrastructure level: keeping databases and platforms fast and reliable, and finding the root cause when they aren't.
I work as an independent contractor through my company, Asher AB.
Recent work
Database performance tuning on a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations production system for a large Finnish enterprise.
Lead platform engineer for a Dataiku GenAI/ML platform on AWS at the European arm of a Japanese car manufacturer. Responsible for the EKS clusters, compute scaling and Datadog monitoring for roughly 900 users.
Data platform engineer at a Finnish airline. Led the Airflow 2 to 3 migration, redesigned the MWAA networking and DNS setup to meet security requirements, and built TypeScript CDK constructs for the data platform. Also administered Snowflake and BigQuery.
A large part of my work is diagnosis. Two recent examples: an application outage caused by PostgreSQL 13 reaching end-of-life and being removed from the Amazon Linux repositories, and a platform-wide outage traced to duplicate vanity URLs. In both cases I restored service and added monitoring so the same problem gets caught earlier next time.
Earlier
- Cloud and data engineering at a Helsinki data consultancy: Kafka Connect streaming into Snowflake, Terraform, dbt.
- DevOps consulting for Nordic banks and insurers (Backstage, ArgoCD, Kafka, ELK).
- DBA and later cloud database architect at a German medical device manufacturer, responsible for 200+ servers and around 3,000 SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL and SAP ASE databases supporting its production lines.
- DBA, Oracle and BI roles in New Zealand, Australia and Romania.
Tools
SQL Server and Azure SQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Snowflake, AWS, EKS, Terraform, AWS CDK, Airflow, dbt, Datadog, Python, TypeScript
Certifications
Snowflake SnowPro Core, Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD), Microsoft Azure Data Engineer Associate
Contact
Available for contract work, remote or hybrid within the EU. You can reach me on LinkedIn.
Covered by Liability insurance
Experience
Professional experience10+ years
Freelancer since2025
Languages
GermanBasic knowledgeEnglishNative speaker
Project history
Dynamics 365 F&O performance tuning of Azure SQL DB
Dataiku Platform Engineering