2017 - 2018: chat bot ?Oscar?

Role: Lead Software Engineer, Auckland, New Zealand

Customer: Air New Zealand Ltd.

Task:

• Worked on the award-winning chat bot ?Oscar?, powered by a bespoke cloud-based machine learning stack that successfully answers ~75% customer queries. Oscar has become profitable in less than one year since inception.
• Regular and substantial contributions to the organization to improve agility and efficiency across the business. Involved in hiring key personnel in strategic areas.
• Responsible for managing a team of Software Engineers and relationships with stakeholders such as product owners, solution architects and development managers.
• Developed the Air New Zealand Alexa skill which enabled the company to become Amazon?s launch partner in Australasia for Amazon Alexa.
• Built a data filtering pipeline for GDPR compliance using spaCy (machine learning NLP library) to mask sensitive customer data which is non-parsable (e.g. names, addresses).

2014 - 2017: Provided technical leadership

Role: Solution Architect / My Vodafone Tech Lead, Auckland, New Zealand

Customer: Vodafone New Zealand Ltd.

Task:

• Provided technical leadership to six development teams working on My Vodafone, one of New Zealand's most frequented self-service systems.
• Defined and implemented a new micro-service architecture for My Vodafone. This enabled a new agile development paradigm and led to an incremental transition away from +10 years old proprietary systems, while providing immediate business benefits from day one.
• Established a highly collaborative test-driven development culture, introduced continuous integration and defined the role model ?Agile Developer?. Under my watch, My VF grew from one development team to six agile teams and missed releases were eliminated entirely.
• Produced a number of unconventional innovative solution designs that resulted in massive benefits to our customers. I was also heavily involved in projects beyond My Vodafone such as Identity Management, micro-service based integration, ESB and cloud computing.
• Responsible for the successful, timely and efficient delivery of a number of key self-service features and products such as MyFlex, Mates, Enterprise Shared Data, Consumer Shared Data, My VF Search, Single My VF and many more.
• Initiated Dev Meet-ups. Quarterly meetings that give development teams of the Digital department time and space to celebrate success, exchange knowledge and grow together.

2013 - 2014: core systems

Role: Java Tech Lead, Auckland, New Zealand

Customer: Yellow Pages Group Ltd.

Task:

• Led two Java teams which successfully delivered a number of core systems to the business such as an order and product management system, a billing system and a high-traffic HTTP file store that serves Yellow's public content.
• Continuously improved procedures, tools and standards to ensure that code produced by the teams is high-calibre and fit for purpose. Reviewing the teams work and performance and responsible for hiring new staff.

2008 - 2012: Defined and established the software development process and tool chain

Role: Senior Software Engineer, GBS Financial Services Sector, Zurich, Switzerland

Customer: International Business Machines Corp. (IBM)

Task:

• Defined and established the software development process and tool chain for a project with +80 FTEs and a budget of $51m.
• Designed and coded an award-winning web based project information system using Spring Web MVC, Neo4J and web services.
• Development team lead and money market subject matter expert, heavily involved in design and realization of complex financial web applications based on J2EE/Spring.
• Responsible for allocation and utilization of a development team, prioritizing work, tracking progress and reporting results to senior management.
• Developed and introduced strategies for continuous integration, automated testing and development standards to the development staff of three multi-million financial products.
• Transformed legacy core banking applications into modern Java Eclipse RCP applications, using mathematical models and code generation, resulting in project cost savings of 60%.
• Responsible for design and realization of three mobile applications in the banking and logistics sector, using Android and cross platform development frameworks.
• Redesigned and implemented integral parts of a strong authentication web application used to secure e-banking systems of several Swiss retail banks.

2006 - 2008: architecture and development of a real-time asset management system

Role: Software Engineer, Frankfurt, Germany

Customer: Landsbanki Kepler

Task:

• Responsible for architecture and development of a real-time asset management system in C# .NET and MS SQL Server.
• Conducted staff training at Merlin Projects in Warsaw (Poland) on product development and maintenance.
• Provided troubleshooting and bug-fixes for critical in-house business solutions using C# and VBA.

2004 - 2006: web applications

Role: Software Engineer / Systems Engineer, Frankfurt, Germany

Customer: Pro Open GmbH

Task:

• Worked as leading technical consultant on web related projects, successfully implementing a number of web applications with Zope, Typo3 and AJAX.
• Developed the web application ?AdCast Web?, which became an integral part of the core product ?AdCast One?.
• Administered Linux based systems and provided international customer support.