Work

A few of the teams I’ve joined, what they were up against, and what changed.

Swisscom

Seventy microservices behind a software-defined corporate network

Technical Lead & Senior Software Engineer · Bern, Switzerland · 2023 – 2026

Situation

Swisscom offers businesses a software-defined network (SDN) that overlays their corporate WAN on Swisscom’s network. Because an SDN is built from virtual network functions rather than physical devices, setting up and reconfiguring a company’s network is faster, easier and more affordable. A 15-person team built and operated the roughly 70 microservices that provision it, and the programme’s largest epics needed breaking down before the team could move on them.

What I did

I was hired as Scrum Master and ended up in the code. Along the way I took on DevOps and Product Owner duties wherever they improved the team’s flow, including decomposing and planning several of the programme’s largest epics.

Result

Features kept shipping into a live service that businesses use to run their corporate networks, with the big epics turned into work the team could actually pick up.

Java · Spring · Domain-Driven Design · Python · Pandas · Scikit-learn · Oracle · MongoDB · GitLab · Claude Code · Copilot

Vantage Elevation

One order for a complete elevator

Contract Team Lead · New York · 2018 – 2021

Situation

A private-equity buyer had acquired several elevator parts manufacturers, each with its own configure-price-quote (CPQ) system. A customer who wanted an elevator had to assemble it vendor by vendor.

What I did

I replaced the separate systems with one integrated CPQ platform, and set up AWS-based CI/CD that delivered both into the VPC and onto Vantage’s own premises. I arrived as an engineer and ended up working across the table from the CIO and CFO.

Result

Customers could order a complete elevator in one place instead of piecing it together from several vendors.

Java · Spring · Hibernate · Tacton CPQ · Cucumber · Postgres · AWS · Terraform

Threatray

Making a malware-analysis pipeline easy to change

Contract Senior Engineer · Biel, Switzerland · 2021 – 2022

Situation

A six-engineer startup was applying machine learning to malware DNA analysis: a sophisticated microservices pipeline for dissecting samples at scale. Key components had become hard to change, and many services could only be run inside Docker, so every change meant a rebuild and a wait.

What I did

I reworked the service boundaries toward a hexagonal architecture, and built a local development and debugging setup that let engineers run and debug a single service on its own.

Result

The key components became easy to change, and rebuild-and-wait dropped to seconds.

Python · Kubernetes · Docker · Keycloak · RabbitMQ · Postgres

Commodity futures trading

Trading against our own risk model

Portfolio Risk Decision Support · New York · 2014 – 2016

Situation

A two-person team needed a way to decide how much risk to take in a commodity futures portfolio, and to trust that decision with real money.

What I did

We built a risk decision-support system using Markowitz portfolio theory, principal component analysis and Monte Carlo simulation, and traded against it ourselves.

Result

As confidence in the model grew, we scaled from $1,000 to $100,000 of daily value at risk.

Java · Python · Pandas · Jupyter · Scikit-learn · Bloomberg · R

TalkTalk

Thirteen years of continuous release

Customer Portal & Point-of-Sale · Zug, Switzerland · 2004 – 2017

Situation

The retail channel needed software to run on: a customer portal and point of sale across web, tablets and passport-scanning devices, connected to several suppliers’ systems.

What I did

I built and evolved that software and the back ends integrating it with the suppliers.

Result

The retail channel ran on it through thirteen years of continuous release.

C# · .NET · JavaScript ES6 · Vue.js · WordPress · PHP · SQL Server

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