Stadt Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
I design language features and runtime systems for Terraform, used by millions of engineers to manage cloud infrastructure. On the Terraform Core team at HashiCorp, I led the design and implementation of Terraform Actions — Terraform's first imperative language construct — and was a core team lead on Terraform Stacks. Both projects resulted in patents. I received IBM's Outstanding Technical Achievement Award for the Actions work. Before HashiCorp, I architected Kommander, a multi-cluster Kubernetes control plane at Mesosphere (now D2iQ), leading an 8-person team during the company's strategic pivot from Mesos to Kubernetes. Earlier, I built mobile apps and Go microservices for AIDA Cruises and shipped React/React Native applications at weluse. My career spans backend (Go, Node.js), frontend (React, React Native), infrastructure (Kubernetes, IaC), and language design — I follow interesting problems regardless of the stack. I write about Terraform internals and language design at https://danielmschmidt.de
Currently leading cross-team technical coordination for a major new product initiative across Terraform's Fundamentals organization — program-level roadmap ownership, cross-team enablement, and delivery toward GA. Led the design and implementation of Terraform Actions, a new imperative language construct that enables native Day 2 operations (configuration, maintenance, orchestration) within Terraform's declarative model. This was Terraform's most significant language addition in years, shipped on a compressed 9-month timeline to align with IBM's strategic integration goals. Key contributions: - Designed the Actions syntax, execution model, and trigger semantics - Created Terraform's first event-streaming RPC protocol for long-running provider operations - Coordinated day-one provider support across AWS and internal provider teams - Named inventor on IBM patent for Terraform Actions - Received IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award (OTAA) — Major Award Core team lead on Terraform Stacks during transition from prototype to production; led implementation of Deferred Actions capability and component destroy lifecycle. Co-inventor on US Patent 12293235.
#1 contributor to CDKTF by commit volume (2,336 commits, 200+ PRs). Co-led the technical direction of CDK for Terraform, a tool that brought Terraform infrastructure configuration to TypeScript, Python, Go, Java, and C#. Designed and shipped major product capabilities: - Import support integrating Terraform 1.5's plannable imports — two paradigms for bringing existing infrastructure under CDKTF management - Provider namespace architecture (multiple breaking API changes) that solved compilation issues across non-TypeScript languages and reduced compile times - Automated provider documentation generation pipeline used across the Terraform provider ecosystem - Python synth performance optimization: reduced synthesis time from 30s to 2s Drove architectural decisions including replacing custom Terraform Cloud API integration with CLI delegation, dramatically simplifying the codebase.
Designed and built multiple foundational CDKTF features from scratch: - HCL-to-CDK converter (cdktf convert) — the primary onboarding path for migrating from HCL to CDK languages - Cross-stack references — enabling multi-stack architectures with resource sharing across stacks - Full multi-stack deployment system — serial, parallel, and dependency-ordered deployments with graceful abort handling - Unit testing helpers and developer ergonomics (toHaveResource, toBeValidTerraform) — making CDKTF infrastructure testable - Terraform function bindings for all CDK languages Shipped 6+ breaking changes that reshaped the product's API surface to improve developer experience across all supported languages. Co-authored blog posts on CDKTF 0.15 and 0.18 releases.
Architect and technical lead for Kommander, a centralized multi-cluster Kubernetes control plane that enabled Mesosphere's strategic pivot from Mesos/DC/OS to Kubernetes. Designed the system architecture: React frontend, Node.js/GraphQL backend, and Go-based Kubernetes operators for federating configuration, policies, and secrets across customer cluster fleets. Led an 8-person team while coordinating with ~50 people across the organization. Solved critical scaling challenges including a thundering-herd data ingestion problem by redesigning from centralized polling to operator-driven microservice ingestion. Previously worked on the DC/OS frontend — one of the most complex web applications in the industry, handling real-time data from 8000+ node clusters via WebSockets, server-sent events, and long-lived HTTP connections.
Consulted for open source projects and startups. Key engagements: - Wix/Detox: Contributed to the React Native E2E testing framework - idalabs.de: Built production infrastructure with Terraform and Ansible
Built a user-facing iOS and Android app using React Native and maintained Go microservices running on Kubernetes clusters deployed on individual cruise ships. Co-designed a deployment process resilient to intermittent ship connectivity. Helped roll out standardized Kubernetes clusters on ship-based VMs.
Full-stack development with React, React Native, and Node.js. Built web and mobile applications for clients across industries.