Raphael V. - Tech-/Team Lead/Architect/Engineer

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Hamburg, Germany

Experience

Jan 2022 - Present

3 years 9 months

Tech-/Team Lead/Architect/Engineer

Freelance IT Consultant

Independent software engineer focusing mainly on complex backend architectures.

Feb 2015 - Jan 2022

7 years

Hybrid

VP Technology

Mondia Group

Reduced technical debt, containerized parts of the platform and migrated to hybrid-cloud deployments (Azure, AWS, private cloud).
Led the design and implementation of various new services and products that enhanced Mondia's technical capabilities and product portfolio.

Jul 2012 - Jan 2015

2 years 7 months

Head of Research & Development

Mondia Group

Headed software development and quality assurance of core platform teams in Hamburg, and external teams in Poland and Hungary.
Built a new development center in Cairo, Egypt, growing to over 120 employees across development, QA, product and IT operations, reducing internal mandate rates by 60%.
Contributed to RFP/RFQ processes for international telecommunication companies, securing new business in North and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Acted as architect and lead developer of Mondia's Public Partner APIs.
Researched and introduced Node.js and MongoDB as a second standard stack.
Established a DevOps practice with CI/CD based on Ansible, Puppet and Jenkins.

Jan 2012 - Jun 2012

6 months

Hanoi, Viet Nam

Technical Consultant

FPT Software // Mondia Media Germany GmbH

Led recruitment, onboarding and training of offshore development teams as extended capacity for Hamburg.
Introduced teams to the Java-based platform and trained them on usage and internals.
Implemented a SCRUM-like process adapted for distributed teams across multiple time zones.
Worked as lead developer on delivery teams for multiple cross-content entertainment portals (games, music, videos).

Oct 2010 - Jan 2012

1 year 4 months

Hamburg, Germany

Senior Developer & Scrum Master

Mondia Media Germany GmbH

Developed and optimized highly scalable backend services for Mondia's entertainment platform.
Introduced a unified API layer for secure external developer access to Mondia's platform.
Supported agile transition by training and coaching development teams and key stakeholders.

Oct 2005 - Jan 2010

4 years 4 months

Espelkamp, Germany

Software Developer

BEIT Systemhaus GmbH

Architected and developed various client portals and internal billing and invoicing systems.
Led migration of a NATURAL-based profit sharing system to a new J2EE and JSF-based system.

Lead Software Engineer, Music Streaming

Mondia Group

Delivered a music streaming platform for Italy's largest telecom provider, TIM, through Mondia's Music API.
Integrated metadata providers to clean and match catalogs for millions of songs.
Transcoded the music catalog to additional formats (up to 320 kbit/s) and migrated storage to MS Azure Blob Storage.
Enabled browsing, searching, dynamic radios and mood playlists based on user consumption.
Technologies: Java, Spring Boot, MySQL, Node.js, MongoDB, SOLR/Lucene, PredictionIO.

Senior Software Engineer, Automotive App

Mondia Group

Led migration of an iOS app backend from a self-managed Kubernetes cluster to Microsoft Azure.
Modernized and refactored codebase while adding new features.
Technologies: Spring Boot, Spring Security, Hibernate, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, Microsoft Azure.

Senior Software Engineer, Maintenance Portal

Mondia Group

Extended a microservice-based portal for wagons and wheelsets with additional features.
Established common code and architectural conventions, specifically for Kafka inter-service communication.
Reviewed database schemas and proposed optimizations.
Collaborated with DevOps to implement logging and tracing across services using Grafana, Loki and Tempo.
Technologies: Spring Boot, Spring Security, Kafka, Hibernate, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Kubernetes, Grafana, Loki, Tempo.

Software Engineer, Android Games Store

Mondia Group

Implemented a fully native alternative app store using Android SDK to avoid "unknown sources" warnings.
Collaborated with hardware manufacturers (Samsung) and telecom providers (Vodacom) to develop a custom app installation mechanism.
Technologies: Android SDK, Gradle, RxJava.

Tech Lead & Software Engineer, Blockchain

Mondia Group

Researched and implemented real-time monitoring for blockchain transactions on Ethereum and Avalanche and decentralized exchanges (Uniswap, TraderJoe, SushiSwap).
Conducted research to identify and automate trading opportunities.
Technologies: Ethereum, Web3j, Spring Boot, Kafka, MySQL.

Tech Lead & Software Engineer, Fraud Detection

Mondia Group

Designed and implemented a real-time fraud detection framework for performance marketing campaigns.
Blocked significant portions of fraudulent activities, improving customer lifetime value and reducing complaints.
Technologies: Spring Boot, Redis, Docker, Nomad, Microsoft Azure.

Tech Lead & Software Engineer, Mobile Payments

Mondia Group

Revamped a payment platform from a Spring 3 monolith to a microservices-based architecture using Spring Boot (REST) and Spring Cloud.
Migrated data flows to Apache Kafka to decouple services and improve resilience, enabling complex pause and retry scenarios and deeper capacity insights using Lenses, Apache Druid and Snowflake.
Modernized deployments with Docker and Nomad and introduced monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana.
Technologies: Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, MySQL, Kafka, Docker, Nomad, Jenkins, Grafana, Prometheus, Microsoft Azure.

Summary

My expertise in Java and Spring Boot, coupled with extensive knowledge of a broad range of open-source technologies including various database systems (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB), Kafka, Git, CI/CD (Jenkins, GitHub Actions), ELK-Stack and others, allows me to excel in creating and delivering software solutions that are both efficient and effective.