Gabriel Dinu

Gabriel Dinu

Twelve years building and supporting retail systems at scale — from L1 helpdesk to leading the L2 team behind Delhaize Romania's POS, self-checkout, and backend infrastructure. ITIL certified, Linux-focused, and increasingly drawn to the automation side: infrastructure that can be torn down and rebuilt from a git repository.

Projects

Things I've built, and what I learned building them.

Self-Hosted Kubernetes Homelab

A bare-metal k3s cluster managed entirely through GitOps. This page is served from it.

Every workload is declared in git and reconciled by Argo CD using the App-of-Apps pattern, so manual changes self-heal back to the committed state. TLS certificates are issued automatically by cert-manager through Let's Encrypt DNS-01 challenges, requiring no inbound port for validation. Credentials are encrypted with Sealed Secrets so they live safely in version control. Debugging spans the full stack — I traced a broken public HTTPS path from ISP CGNAT checks through router NAT rules down to a duplicate containerPort conflict in a Traefik Helm override.

k3s
Argo CD
Traefik
cert-manager
Sealed Secrets
Prometheus
Cloudflare

View repository →

Retail Rollout Automation

Scripted deployment and rollback procedures for POS and self-checkout estates.

Built and maintained custom scripts for rolling out software across a national retail footprint, with tested rollback paths to prevent prolonged downtime during production changes. Reduced manual effort and made deployments repeatable across sites.

Bash
Linux
Windows Server
POS
SCO

L2 Software Support Engineer — Team Lead

Romanian Business Consult

Dec 2019 — Present

Lead the team implementing and supporting retail solutions for Delhaize Romania
Own root cause analysis and all customer-facing communication for assigned accounts
Manage deployments of self-checkout (SCO), POS, backend monitoring, and peripherals
Write and maintain rollout/rollback scripts, minimising downtime during production changes
Review and validate FSDs, Change Requests, and BRDs through Jira
Provide 24/7 on-call emergency support while maintaining client SLAs
Liaise with vendors including Diebold Nixdorf and NCR to resolve escalations

System Support Engineer — Level 2

Romanian Business Consult

May 2015 — Dec 2019

Implemented software solutions across varied retail environments
Advised clients on rollout strategy to meet objectives without affecting production
Escalated L3 issues to vendors; authored documentation for the L1 helpdesk
Delivered end-user training on application usage

IT Technical Support — Level 1

Romanian Business Consult

May 2014 — May 2015

Diagnosed and resolved hardware and software faults
Owned issues end-to-end while managing customer expectations

Back Office Administrator

BCR

Mar 2013 — May 2014

Processed corporate and retail account requests through dedicated banking applications
Verified authorised representative rights against submitted legal documentation
Oversaw and tested the rollout of a new internal software application

Skills

Tools and practices I work with day to day.

Kubernetes & GitOps

k3s
Argo CD
Helm
App-of-Apps
kubectl

Automation & Scripting

Bash
Python
cloud-init
Git
Rollback design

Systems

Linux
Windows Server
Docker
systemd
WSUS

Networking & Security

Traefik
cert-manager
TLS
DNS
Cloudflare
iptables

Retail Systems

POS
Self-Checkout
Diebold Nixdorf
NCR
Fiscal homologation

Service Management

ITIL
Jira
MS CRM
ServiceNow
SAP
SQL Server

Projects

Self-Hosted Kubernetes Homelab

Retail Rollout Automation

Experience

L2 Software Support Engineer — Team Lead

System Support Engineer — Level 2

IT Technical Support — Level 1

Back Office Administrator

Skills

Kubernetes & GitOps

Automation & Scripting

Systems

Networking & Security

Retail Systems

Service Management

Education & Certifications

BSc International Economic Relations

Certifications

Languages