<!-- l. 55 --><pclass='noindent'>Staff Software Engineer and published author (“Rust Web Development”– Manning) with 15+ years making
pragmatic architecture decisions for backend systems at scale. Currently shipping Rust, C++, and Python code to
hundreds of millions of Firefox users at Mozilla. Founded Rust&Tell Berlin, the largest Rust meetup globally.
</div><h4class='sectionHead'id='professional-experience'><aid='x1-30000'></a><divclass='centerline'> PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE </div></h4><divclass='section'>
<brclass='newline'/><spanclass="company">Mozilla</span>, Remote <brclass='newline'/>Shipping Rust, C++, and Python code across Firefox desktop and mobile to hundreds of millions of users. All work is open source.
<liclass='itemize'>Consolidated four separate favicon implementations across Firefox teams into a single Image Service – chose to extend an existing Python/Airflow pipeline rather than build a new microservice, now serving 4 teams from one manifest behind a GCS-backed API
<liclass='itemize'>Implemented Oblivious HTTP (OHTTP) from scratch in application-services (shared Rust component cross-compiled to Swift and Kotlin via UniFFI) plus handwritten C++ and Rust for Firefox Desktop – users are now unidentifiable when making privacy-sensitive requests across all platforms
<liclass='itemize'>Contributor and code reviewer for UniFFI, Mozilla’s multi-language bindings generator enabling Rust code to be called from Kotlin, Swift, Python, and JavaScript
<liclass='itemize'>Built Rust extensions for Merino (Python/FastAPI service powering Firefox Suggest); wrote RFCs, mapped out project plans, and surfaced cross-team blockers early
<liclass='itemize'>Led “Rusty Fridays” internal education sessions, guiding engineers through Rust adoption and mentoring junior contributors across teams</li></ul>
<!-- Toposware -->
<pclass='noindent'><spanclass='cmsl-10'>Senior Systems Engineer, Team Lead - Full-time </span>April 2023 - June 2024
<brclass='newline'/><spanclass="company">Toposware</span>, Remote <brclass='newline'/>Core team of 4 building a peer-to-peer distributed network protocol from scratch in Rust.</p>
<liclass='itemize'>Achieved 10x throughput per node by profiling and targeting the actual bottleneck – optimized batch processing and serialization paths, tuned message volumes to avoid throughput degradation – rather than redesigning the consensus layer
<liclass='itemize'>Led benchmark initiative with 3 engineers that revealed nodes were compute-bound on encryption/decryption, not network-limited – findings redirected optimization effort away from networking toward crypto performance
<liclass='itemize'>Rewrote the CLI from scratch, replacing error-prone CLI parameters with local config files – reduced operator misconfiguration during node setup
<liclass='itemize'>Set up load testing, CI/CD pipelines, and Grafana dashboards for production observability</li></ul>
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<pclass='noindent'><spanclass='cmsl-10'>Senior Software Engineer - Full-time </span>August 2022 - February 2023
<brclass='newline'/><spanclass="company">Centrifuge</span>, Remote <brclass='newline'/>Protocol team building DeFi applications on Substrate/Polkadot in a self-governed organization.</p>
<liclass='itemize'>Implemented fund pool mutations on-chain, enabling users to adjust capital allocations in live pools – core feature for the lending protocol
<liclass='itemize'>Replaced manual documentation with CI-driven auto-generation from Rust source on every PR – eliminated persistent drift between code and public docs
<liclass='itemize'>Published “Rust Web Development” through Manning – end-to-end guide covering async Rust, web frameworks, and production deployment, distributed globally</li></ul>
<brclass='newline'/><spanclass="company">Twilio Inc.</span>, Remote <brclass='newline'/>Second Solutions Architect hired for the new EMEA Professional Services team. Led enterprise integrations across contact center, messaging, and voice products.
<liclass='itemize'>Technical lead for Fortune 500 engagements: debugged audio quality and latency issues, redesigned messaging flows, and advised clients on achievable architectures given their team size and resources
<liclass='itemize'>Advocated for combining two existing lower-cost Twilio products over adopting a newer, more expensive one for a major engagement – reduced client spend while using battle-tested components
<liclass='itemize'>Hired and onboarded engineers to scale the Professional Services team</li></ul>
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<pclass='noindent'><spanclass='cmsl-10'>Systems Engineer - Contract </span>August 2019 - May 2020
<brclass='newline'/><spanclass="company">Kraken Digital Currency Exchange</span>, Remote (San Francisco)<brclass='newline'/>Member of the first Rust engineering team (12 engineers), replacing core banking infrastructure and API gateway.</p>
<liclass='itemize'>Migrated core banking services and API gateway from PHP to Rust, achieving 100x throughput improvement – enabling the exchange to absorb order-of-magnitude traffic growth without scaling hardware
<liclass='itemize'>Founded the monthly “Rust & Tell Berlin” meetup – grew it into the largest Rust meetup globally, still running years later
<liclass='itemize'>Designed authentication infrastructure for <spanclass="company">OSRAM</span>’s IoT platform (thousands of connected lighting devices) using Keycloak for user auth and service-to-service auth across microservices (Node.js, Go, Lua)
<liclass='itemize'>First engineering hire at <spanclass="company">Körber Digital</span>: chose Node.js/React/AWS stack, built real-time data pipelines with a time-series database optimized for fast retrieval of sensor data
<liclass='itemize'>Decomposed <spanclass="company">GIATA</span>’s monolithic tourism ERP into 6 Docker-based microservices – rewrote the hotel ingestion pipeline and mass photo upload system, significantly improving UI responsiveness and system scalability
<liclass='itemize'>Tech Lead at <spanclass="company">Avenga</span>: introduced Scrum and refactored a monolith into microservices to unblock parallel team development
<liclass='itemize'>Built analytics dashboards and ad platforms at <spanclass="company">Glispa</span> (AngularJS); mentored teams on modern JavaScript practices</li></ul>
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<pclass='noindent'><spanclass='cmsl-10'>Software Engineer - Full-time </span>August 2015 - February 2016
<brclass='newline'/><spanclass="company">smartB Energy Management GmbH</span>, Berlin <brclass='newline'/>Small agile team building energy monitoring applications for business owners.
<liclass='itemize'>Introduced pair programming and component-based frontend architecture, enabling multiple developers to work on the same codebase without conflicts
<liclass='itemize'>Full-stack development with JavaScript and Python using TDD</li></ul>
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<pclass='noindent'><spanclass='cmsl-10'>Software Engineer - Freelance </span>March 2015 - July 2015
<brclass='newline'/><spanclass="company">blogfoster GmbH</span>, Berlin <brclass='newline'/>First developer hired to replace legacy PHP/Backbone application with Node.js and React.</p>
<liclass='itemize'>Bootstrapped the customer-facing survey platform and analytics dashboards in AngularJS – core UI remained largely untouched in production for close to 10 years</li></ul>
<brclass='newline'/><spanclass="company">TH Ingolstadt</span><brclass='newline'/>Scholarship from Allianz Deutschland AG to study Computer Science, fully funded and with trainings in Scrum,
