Software architecture and technical leadership for products that need to move fast.
Technical leadership with a business edge.
What I do
Embedded technical leadership
Most of the work is knowing what not to build. The decisions that are expensive to reverse are the ones that constrain everything that comes after.
Architecture assessment & due diligence
The decisions underneath a system determine what happens when scale or pressure increases. What is about to break, and what can wait. Assessment before an acquisition, a major investment, or when a system designed at a smaller scale starts to fail.
Pre-sales and product direction with technical depth
A wrong assumption in a proposal becomes a problem in delivery. I have been on both sides. Early assumptions about scope and constraints define where delivery problems surface months later.
My recommendations come from twenty-five years of building systems and living with the consequences of those decisions. The technical and the commercial are not separate conversations. How I think →
Selected work
Retail, backend modernization
Replacing the backend without stopping 2,600+ stores and 9,500+ terminals. No downtime allowed. A wrong data migration would have been visible in every store the next morning. 141M+ documents, 1TB+ data. Throughput target exceeded by 79%, query time reduced 216x.
Luxury e-commerce
Three cities, three teams, one architecture. Distributed teams in Berlin, Geneva, and Shanghai building a luxury brand's e-commerce platform for China. Localization in Chinese and compliance with Chinese authority security requirements. Coordinating architectural decisions across three time zones where a wrong assumption would have blocked the entire market.
Mobility & traffic management
Multiple national traffic sources, each with a different schema and update cycle. No single source of truth, and consumers relying on the output daily. A silent data inconsistency would have propagated through every downstream service. 18 microservices on AWS, 10,000+ events/day, 99.9% uptime. Serving HERE, TomTom, Radio24. In production since 2017.
Public sector
400K+ entities, 9M+ API calls/hour at peak. Requirements still forming while the architecture needed to proceed. The first step was finding the real constraints: optimizing Redis to relieve database pressure and building a roadmap from monolith toward modular architecture.
Enterprise content
Persistence and API layer for Crownpeak, deployed on Kubernetes to thousands of enterprise clients globally. One API contract, thousands of clients depending on it. A breaking change would have required coordinated migration across every client. The hard decision: an architecture that had to hold up over many years of sustained use.
Open source platform
RESTHeart: 10+ years in production, 2M+ downloads. Architecture had to evolve without rewrite, across many major versions and breaking upstream changes. No rollback once users depended on the API contract. Adopted by Unisys, Northrop Grumman, and Crownpeak.
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