Between 2023 and 2024 I worked as a Cloud Engineer at Ericsson AB in Stockholm — the full-time job that followed my master’s thesis internship at Ericsson Research. I joined through the Next Generation program, Ericsson’s graduate rotational scheme, and over two years I moved from building visualization tools to microservices and certificate infrastructure, and finally to Kubernetes/OpenStack cloud automation and an internal AI assistant with a RAG chain.
📸 Scenes from two years in Stockholm
A few snapshots from the office and beyond: the badge, the campus, the gear, the people and the farewells.
🎬 Moments on video
And three short clips that capture the place and the people: ping-pong in the atrium, a frozen padlock in the Swedish snow, and a little tabletop robotic arm I got to play with.
Ping-pong in the office atrium.
A frozen padlock and a Swedish snowfall.
A tabletop robotic arm in the office.
🎯 Year one: the Next Generation program
My first year at Ericsson was a rotational program: instead of being dropped into a single team, I got to try different work areas before choosing where to start my Ericsson career. My first rotation was a taste of what would become a running theme of my portfolio — visualizing connections. I built an interactive tool in JavaScript, HTML and CSS that parses the XML files describing the connections between server components (power units A and B, SEMC, EAM, and friends) and renders them as a navigable graph. Think of it as the corporate cousin of my jQuery Arrows and Graph Sparrow side projects — same instinct, much bigger machines.
🔒 2024: microservices and Certificate Management
In 2024 I joined a unit developing microservices used across Ericsson applications and tools, focusing on the Certificate Management service — the piece that keeps secure communication working between services. Concretely, it ensures every service has the right certificates to talk to the external parties it needs, and maintains a whitelist of authorized servers outside the cluster. My work there included implementing new features, upgrading libraries to their latest versions, and building a Helm schema that proactively identifies configuration issues by validating rules before deployment — my first real taste of production-grade security infrastructure and Kubernetes tooling.
☁️ Cloud integration: Kubernetes, OpenStack & an AI assistant
After a reorganization in 2024, I joined the team integrating Ericsson’s cloud solutions, built on Kubernetes and OpenStack. My focus was automation around those solutions — and the highlight was contributing to an AI tool for internal efficiency: a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) chain that, given Ericsson’s product documentation, can answer questions about how products work, give step-by-step guidance, and — combined with real-time server data — explain the current status of a system and suggest solutions to potential issues. My part was selecting and deploying the Small Language Model (SLM) behind it, prioritizing efficiency so the tool runs with minimal resource requirements. It was my first time shipping LLM-based software to real users, and it directly paved the way for the voice-command and swarm work that followed in my PhD.
🏆 What the two years gave me
- Production microservices: feature development, dependency upgrades and deployment-time validation in a large, security-critical codebase.
- Kubernetes & OpenStack: working day-to-day with the cloud stack that runs modern telecom.
- Certificate/TLS infrastructure: understanding how trust works between services at scale — the boring stuff that keeps everything else alive.
- LLMs in the real world: RAG over technical documentation, SLM selection for efficiency, and live system-data grounding — before it became my research topic.
- Big-company engineering: code review culture, incident responses, and making change in a huge organization.
🏆 Verifications
Ericsson issued me two Credly verifications for the skills I built during the role, both at Experienced level:
Cloud Native — Experienced Assessment · BCSS Google Cloud — Experienced Level (issued by Ericsson).
I left Ericsson at the end of 2024, on my own request, to start my PhD — with a certificate of employment that, I’m glad to say, recommends me. It was the perfect bridge between my double MSc and the research path I’m on now.
Ericsson Kubernetes OpenStack Cloud Engineer · Stockholm · 2023–2024