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 (29)
network-configuration10
python10
automation10
ansible10
ssh10
keepalived9
kubernetes-cluster9
arp9
load-balancer8
bgp8
arduino8
network-load-balancer8
bare-metal8
kubernetes8
disk-image7
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
carstenkoester/wdmx-neopixel
Sep 2023 - Oct 2025
Contributions:17 pushes, 1 branch in 2 years 1 month
carstenkoester/WirelessDMXReceiver
May 2024 - Oct 2025
Wireless DMX receiver library for Arduino with RF24 module
Contributions:2 PRs, 20 pushes, 2 branches in 1 year 5 months
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