About
Freelance cloud architect and software engineer, working alongside your team.
I'm Ilija Matoski, a freelance cloud architect and software engineer. I run Enhalon, where we work hands-on with engineering teams on cloud platforms, Kubernetes, DevOps, and the custom software around them. I also co-founded and run an MSP that operates private EU cloud platforms in colocated datacenters, and before that built and shipped product software at scale.
Background
Professional engineer since 2008, focused on cloud platforms for the last decade.
AWS landing zone for a pan-European car leasing company, with custom Terraform providers, Vault plugins, and a change-management and compliance framework in Go.
Landing zones for clients in energy, aviation, and rail. Highlights included a GDPR-compliant PII platform on GCP, multi-tenant Kubernetes clusters, and edge software for a rail operator.
Coder on Kubernetes, a Jenkins-to-GitHub-Actions migration, and an observability stack on Grafana, Prometheus, Pyroscope, and OpenTelemetry for a global consulting firm.
Founder and CTO of an MSP that operates private EU cloud platforms and managed services. I lead architecture and infrastructure operations, plus the commercial side: datacenter and vendor relationships, hiring, and budgeting. The setup grew from physical-server deployments into self-contained private clouds running in colocated EU datacenters.
Principal engineer and team lead at a brand protection company. I led the rebuild from monolith to microservices, ran a cross-datacenter hybrid setup on dedicated hardware, and built in-house image-recognition for counterfeit detection. The platform processed roughly 30PB of data a month at peak.
Led engineering teams at product companies in life sciences and intelligence analysis. The life-sciences work was on networked lab instruments end-to-end: custom hardware, embedded firmware, and a cloud platform that scheduled and remotely controlled them.
How I work
A few principles that show up in every engagement. They're about how the work happens, not what the work is. The "what" lives on the services page.
End-to-end across the stack
From PCBs and embedded firmware to AWS landing zones and Kubernetes platforms. I've worked at every layer between, which helps when a problem turns out to be in a layer a cloud-only team can't see.
Build, then hand off
Engagements end with your team running the platform themselves. I pair on the build, document the operational patterns, then step out.
Engineer-led, not slides
Most of an engagement is in the code, the infrastructure, and the operational tooling. Slides come up when they help the team decide something.
Senior input on tough decisions
For teams that need a second opinion on architecture, cost, or operational risk, I do the analysis alongside the people who'll live with the decision.
Technologies we work with
Public cloud, private hardware, or both. We pick the simplest tool that solves the problem.
Foundation
Containers and orchestration
Infrastructure as code
Languages
Source and CI
Observability
Also worked with
Tools we've run in past engagements. Less central to current work, but the experience is there when it's the right fit.
Networking and edge
Databases
Message queues
Identity
Incident response
Developer tooling
Outside client work I co-organize the Go Amsterdam meetup. It keeps me close to the engineering community in Amsterdam.
Recommendations from past colleagues and clients are on LinkedIn.
Enhalon
The company
On-site, hybrid, or remote within the Netherlands. Primarily remote elsewhere in the EU and worldwide, with on-site visits by arrangement.
Registered with the Dutch Chamber of Commerce.
Dutch VAT-registered for invoicing within the EU.
A small, focused practice.
Working on something we can help with?
Tell us what you're building. We'll be straight with you about whether it's a good fit.