§ 01 — Introduction

Armando Ferrara

Enterprise Infrastructure & AI Architect
for financial institutions and platform teams across Switzerland & EMEA
Associate Director · UBS · ETH Zürich

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Armando Ferrara — keynote, Dormakaba Switzerland conference Plate I
Keynote · Dormakaba Switzerland · 2023
Plate II Armando Ferrara — internal architecture talk, technical session
Internal Architecture Talk · 2024
The Practice

Designing systems where reliability is non-negotiable.

I specialise in resilient distributed systems for enterprise-scale environments — where uptime, security, and operational excellence are contractual requirements, not aspirational goals.

Resilience is not redundancy. It is understanding failure modes, designing explicit degradation paths, and observing systems deeply enough to surface problems before they reach customers.

Across nine years and four countries, I have worked at the intersection of cloud-native infrastructure, Kubernetes, distributed architecture, and applied AI — helping financial institutions and enterprise organisations modernise critical systems without disrupting production stability.

Based in Zürich, I currently serve as Associate Director at UBS, where I architect the infrastructure underpinning instant payment operations across Switzerland and EMEA.

Areas of Practice

Services & Specialisations

§ 03.01

Infrastructure Architecture

Cloud-native platforms designed for the reliability bar of regulated enterprise systems. End-to-end ownership from architecture to production.
§ 03.02

Kubernetes & Platform Engineering

Production-grade orchestration, cluster optimisation, security hardening, and operational excellence. CKA & CKAD certified. Delivered at enterprise scale across financial infrastructure.
§ 03.03

AI Systems & LLM Infrastructure

RAG pipelines, agentic systems, inference architecture, and AI platform integration. Designed for production reliability — not prototypes. Grounded in ETH Zürich Data Science specialisation.
§ 03.04

Distributed Systems Consulting

Event-driven architecture, observability, and scalability engineering for organisations whose systems cannot afford to be re-platformed twice. Strategic advisory and hands-on delivery.
Professional History

Selected Experience

UBS

Mar 2024 — Present · Zürich, CH
Banking & Financial
Associate Director · Cloud-Native Infrastructure
Architecting and scaling a cloud-native platform for instant payment processing across EMEA and Switzerland. Kubernetes cluster engineering, Istio service mesh with mTLS, Cosmos DB optimisation, and CI/CD pipeline automation. CTO-recognised contributions to the bank's inner-source infrastructure library.

Dormakaba

Sep 2021 — Mar 2024 · Zürich, CH
Industrial & IoT
Cloud Software Engineer
Distributed IoT access-control infrastructure on AWS using event-driven architecture, Kafka, CQRS, and Event Sourcing. Delivered 10% performance improvement, 30% increase in customer satisfaction, and doubled IoT device sales.

Huawei

Sep 2020 — Sep 2021 · Zürich, CH
Telecommunications
Software Engineer
Internal management platform connecting Huawei Europe and Huawei China. Microservices on Huawei Cloud with Node.js, Next.js, gRPC, and GraphQL. Enterprise-grade high availability at scale.

Alma Consulting

Jan 2016 — Jan 2020 · Naples, IT
Enterprise Consulting
IT Consultant
Enterprise software consulting across multiple clients. Solution delivery with Java and Spring, requirements engineering, and software lifecycle management.
Selected Work

Case Studies

I
Kubernetes · Payment Infrastructure · EMEA

Scaling Cloud-Native Infrastructure for Global Payment Systems

At UBS, I led the architecture and scaling of Kubernetes clusters supporting instant payment processing across Switzerland and EMEA. By rearchitecting cluster topology, optimising resource allocation, and introducing production-grade observability, I delivered a platform capable of handling enterprise-scale transaction volumes — with measurable improvements to uptime, cost efficiency, and operational reliability.
II
Service Mesh · Zero-Trust · Financial Infrastructure

Implementing Enterprise Service Mesh Architecture

Designed and implemented a production service mesh using Istio with mutual TLS across all inter-service communication within a critical financial system. The initiative eliminated clear-text internal traffic, enforced zero-trust communication policies, and enabled fine-grained traffic management — meeting security requirements and audit standards for a regulated banking environment.
III
Platform Consolidation · Operational Excellence

Reducing Infrastructure Complexity Through Platform Consolidation

Led the adoption of a unified cluster strategy to replace fragmented multi-cluster deployments. The consolidation reduced operational overhead, improved deployment consistency, and improved SLA metrics — enabling the engineering team to scale operations without proportional growth in infrastructure complexity. Subsequently adopted as standard across the organisation.
IV
AI Infrastructure · RAG · Agentic Systems

AI Infrastructure & Agentic Systems Engineering

Architected AI infrastructure combining retrieval-augmented generation, agentic orchestration, and LLM inference pipelines. Focused on production-grade reliability: deterministic retrieval, context management at scale, and integration with enterprise data sources — delivering AI systems with the operational discipline expected of critical infrastructure.
Academic & Professional Credentials

Education & Certifications

ETH Zürich

Diploma of Advanced Studies — Data Science
2024 — 2026

Università degli Studi di Salerno

Master of Science — Computer Science · Italian Innovative Thesis Award 2021
2018 — 2020

Università degli Studi di Salerno

Bachelor of Science — Computer Science
2015 — 2018
Armando Ferrara at ETH Zürich Hauptgebäude — Diploma of Advanced Studies, Data Science
ETH Zürich · Data Science · 2024–2026
Credentials Ledger Total · 58 professional certifications · 2018 – 2026
Domain I Cloud-Native
Domain II AI & ML
Domain III Distributed Systems
Domain IV Cloud Platforms
Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) CNCF · 2024
Kubernetes Certified Application Developer (CKAD) CNCF · 2024
AI Engineer — LLM Engineering, RAG & Agentic AI Udemy · 2026
Agentic AI & Mathematics for Machine Learning DeepLearning.AI · 2025–26
Complete ledger available on LinkedIn or by request.
Correspondence

Available for selected consulting and architecture engagements.

Direct
linkedin / ferraraarmando
Practice
Zürich, Switzerland
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Practice Enterprise Architecture · AI · Distributed Systems Areas Switzerland · EMEA Languages EN · IT