Curriculum Vitae
Professional Summary
I’m a software engineer with management experience, and I thrive in environments which require technical expertise as well as good communication and leadership.
In my roughly 20 years as a software engineer, I have worked on multiple high traffic, distributed services in all stages of their life-cycles, in multiple domains, and helped to scale them operationally and organizationally.
I care about good culture and try to increase my understanding of the environments, teams, systems, values, and practices that enable organizations to sustain in an industry, that is fast-paced and requires constant feedback and learning.
Work Experience
Senior Architect at New Work SE, [Jan 2023 - Present] 1
The cloud platform team is part of the central business unit, which provides internal services and products to our engineering organization. This team is an integral part of the cloud move initiative, which aims to lift our production platform into the cloud and help teams to reap the benefits of cloud services.
- build a landing zone, that meets the organization’s needs for security, cost transparency and governance
- bootstrap the cloud center of excellence to connect all business units and accelerate the cloud move
- support and consult early adopters to move first workloads to the cloud
Leveraged skills
AWS cloud service, Terraform, Terragrunt, AWS CDK, Typescript, project management, leadership
Tech Lead at Hive Technologies, [Aug 2022 - Jan 2023] 2
As the tech lead in the delivery experience team, in a fast-growing startup, I worked closely with the product owner to shape upcoming features and help the team to deliver them. In my short time at Hive I invested most of my time in bringing the team up to speed with modern software development practices, identifying system boundaries and responsibilities as well as stabilizing 3rd party integrations.
- stabilize the client, that was used to communicate with 3rd party APIs. I optimized for success rate, resilience and observability
- shape the development process together with the team to move from a reactive mode of working into a proactive one
Leveraged skills
Ruby on Rails, distributed systems, APIs, agile methods, project management, architectural guidance
Team Lead Architecture at New Work SE, [Mar 2020 - Jul 2022] 3
I lead a team of six software architects & software engineers in a newly created solution architecture area. As a platform team, we built and operate the central GraphQL API, which is used by 200+ engineers to build their products faster and more robust. As a former individual contributor in the team, I took on the leadership position and helped my engineers to be self-sustained, autonomous and achieve the team’s objectives.
- build the newly established team and foster good collaboration, team ownership and consistent delivery
- help to establish data-driven software delivery
- and continuous improvement processes for consulting and platform projects
- drive architectural decisions and give architectural guidance for the engineering organization
- enable my direct reports and support them in achieving their objectives and growing them in their functions
- facilitate decision-making, group learning and continuous improvement to help the team take ownership of their platform
Leveraged skills
leadership, management, communication, agile methods, coaching, project management, strategic decision-making, architectural guidance
Senior Software Engineer at New Work SE, [Dec 2015 - Mar 2020] 4
XING One - GraphQL Gateway (2017 - 2020)
I was part of the core platform team that planned, designed, developed and rolled out the central GraphQL Gateway, which is called XING One. I accompanied the service through the early project phase, when it was scaled to the whole organization, and when it reached maturity. The platform is now used by 200+ product engineers to build their products in a largely autonomous way.
- improved data handling for mobile and web clients by providing a faster, safer and more robust way to fetch data using GraphQL
- planned and played an integral role in the development of bigger parts of the GraphQL service like file uploads, caching and logged-out support
- increased availability, resilience, and performance of the GraphQL service through systematic measurement, profiling, monitoring and implementation of the required changes
- built fast, secure, resilient and reliable HTTP level service-to-service communication
- created and carried out workshops to train engineers in GraphQL and Scala
- provided architectural guidance and support for product teams to learn how to leverage GraphQL the best for their domains
Leveraged skills
Scala (AKKA, Finagle, Sangria), Ruby (Rails, Sinatra), GraphQL, distributed systems, RESTful APIs, caching, rate limiting, AMQP, MySQL, HTTP, network, concurrency, communication, lateral leadership
XING Messenger End-to-End Encryption (2016 - 2017)
- planned, designed and documented the integration of a double-ratchet protocol for the XING messenger together with external crypto experts
- designed and developed the backend integration to bring end-to-end encryption to the XING Messenger
- coordinated work of mobile engineers, backend engineers and external experts to bring the required encryption knowledge into the team and enable the delivery of end-to-end encryption
Leveraged skills
Ruby (Rails, Sinatra), AMQP, Cryptography, MySQL, Network protocols
XING Messenger (2015 - 2016)
- introduced highly available, resilient and performant real-time update channel for the XING messenger
- designed and implemented RESTful APIs to enable new features on the XING messenger
- developed load testing component to verify and measure the real-time update channel of the XING messenger and conducted performance / load testing
- improved the quality of the code base by driving and supporting a software design shift that provided a better basis for the development of features
Leveraged skills
Ruby (Rails, Sinatra), Elixir (Phoenix, OTP), AMQP, Cryptography, MySQL, network programming, functional programming, software architecture, software design, coaching, lateral leadership
Senior Software Developer at OMCnet GmbH, [2007 - Nov 2015] 5
- introduced a more reliable and capable version of E-Mail policy service to enforce policies on the MTA
- automated operations workflows and developed solutions to manage a fleet of dedicated and shared servers
- designed, planned, and operated high-available solutions for storage and web services
- developed web-based management interfaces for dedicated and shared hosting environments
- introduced continuous integration pipeline to speed up the delivery of features for internal products
- designed and implemented configuration as code with puppet
Leveraged skills
Ruby, C/C++, Perl, Puppet, Scheme, PostgresQL, MySQL, network protocols, operations
Software Developer at Claxx.net, [2005 - 2007]
- built a fully automated layout engine to generate parts of a magazine with sport-statistical data, which eliminated the need for a lengthy manual layout process
- developed web-based Interface for external customers to leverage in-house sports data
- automated workflows in the production of a sports magazine
Leveraged skills
Ruby, PHP, C/C++, Scheme, MSSQL, SXML, Quark
Skills
Technologies
- GraphQL, APIs, Distributed Services
- AMQP, Redis, MySQL, PostgreSQL
- Compilers & Interpreters
- AWS Cloud Services (CDK, Terraform)
Programming languages
- Scala (3+ years)
- Ruby (10+ years)
- Common Lisp (3+ years)
- Typescript (1+ years)
People & Processes
- Communication with groups and individuals
- Coaching, mentoring and leadership
- Project management
- Agile software delivery
Languages
- German - native
- English - fluent
- Icelandic - novice
- Danish - novice