Friedrich Ewald My Personal Website

Curriculum Vitae

A (mostly complete) list of my professional work. If you have any questions or an interesting opportunity, please feel free to reach out to me via LinkedIn, Mastodon or email.

Summary

  • Software engineer with 10+ years of experience in designing, building, and testing scalable backend systems and micro-services, primarily in Go and Python, processing millions of requests per second. Experienced in designing, and working with SQL and NoSQL databases
  • Built and launched successful websites as a full-stack engineer using HTML, CSS, and Javascript
  • Worked as an co-founder of a startup, individual contributor and as a lead engineer as part of cross-functional teams with data scientists, UI/UX designers, frontend engineers, and product managers
  • Possesses team leadership and strong communication skills. Hired team of backend engineers, mentored junior engineers in their professional development
  • Experienced in working at larger companies like Cisco Systems and DataRobot as well as startups
  • Master’s degree in Computer Science with a focus on databases and information systems

Carta, Inc. (11/2022 - Present)

  • Joined the Data & Storage team as Staff Software Engineer/Technical Leader to evangelize Kafka within the organization
  • Responsible for architecture and implementation of well-tested, reliable Kafka client libraries in Python and Java
  • Worked with key engineers and managers across the company to help shape the strategic direction for Kafka adoption and event driven architecture
  • Reduced cost of existing auditing solution by 80% by rightsizing compute sizes, cron jobs, and and access patterns

DataRobot, Inc. (05/2021 - 09/2022)

  • Integrated the Zepl SaaS notebook platform into DataRobot and maintained the existing codebase
  • Designed parts of a Python-based micro-service framework to harmonize communication and implementation patterns. Collaborated across different teams, helped disambiguate requirements, and attain alignment among stakeholders. Led effort to establish programming patterns that speed up development by a factor of 3 and increased maintainability
  • Led team of 4 backend engineers in building micro-services to run Jupyter notebooks on a multi-tenant Kubernetes cluster, backed by SQL and NoSQL databases. Provided guidance for individual career development
  • Responsible for architecture, design, and implementation of several key components of a greenfield Python-based notebook platform to enable a code-first experience for AI developers

Skills/Technology: Agile, AWS, CI/CD, Docker, Go, Jira, Jupyter notebooks, Kubernetes, MongoDB, MySQL, Pydantic, Python, Redis, SaaS, Team building, Testing, Leadership

Zepl, Inc. (05/2019 - 05/2021), acquired by DataRobot

  • Managerial and technical leader of distributed backend team located in the US and South Korea
  • Collaborated with architects and product managers to migrate the platform from legacy Java monolith to distributed micro-services running on Docker and Kubernetes, as a result, increasing stability and performance
  • Designed and implemented horizontally scalable Go-based micro-services with a focus on performance, reliability, observability, and scalability. Enabled engineers to react to changing requirements more quickly
  • Migrated multiple NoSQL and SQL-databases into a relational database to decrease complexity and remove external dependencies, resulting in a 10x reduction in query times and increased visibility of usage data to upper management
  • Worked with executive leadership, product managers and marketing to define requirements and balance trade-offs
  • Implemented engineering excellence program to foster an exchange of knowledge and improve team performance
  • Zepl was acquired by DataRobot in 2021

Skills/Technology: Agile, Apache Zeppelin, AWS, CI/CD, EKS, Elastic, Docker, Go, Grafana, Jira, Java, Kubernetes, Leadership, MySQL, NATS, OpenTelemetry, Testing

Cisco Systems, Inc. (11/2017 - 05/2019)

  • Designed, built, and deployed micro-services for on-demand and real time machine learning (ML) applications based on Python and Java in large scale production environments, processing millions of requests per second
  • Worked closely with data scientists on developing various machine learning algorithms and ETL pipelines. Designed and developed framework for prototyping machine learning algorithms
  • Led design and development of CI/CD pipelines enabling building, testing, and zero-downtime deployments resulting in more frequent releases and faster delivery of new features

Skills/Technology: AWS, Apache Kafka, CI/CD, Docker, Java, Machine Learning, Python, MySQL

Perspica Networks, Inc. (06/2017 - 11/2017), acquired by Cisco

  • Built micro-services for real time streaming of telemetry data, based on Java and Apache Kafka, supporting a throughput of millions of datapoints per second
  • Designed and implemented RESTful APIs for multiple Java-based backend services and contributed to design of metrics and meta-data store
  • Perspica was acquired by Cisco in 2017

Skills/Technology: Java, Apache Kafka, Docker, Grafana, Monitoring, Telemtry, SQL

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (10/2015 - 06/2017)

  • Built scalable, distributed RESTful Java based services for non-linear optimization of electrical flows in decentralized electrical grids
  • Modularized existing user interface, added support for plugins enabling faster development
  • Developed extension for modeling electrical grids and defining constraints in electrical grids via graphical user interface
  • Worked with stakeholders in a cross-functional team to define requirements and plan implementation

Skills/Technology: .NET, C#, Java, Python, VB

Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg (10/2014 - 12/2015)

  • Developed software to track and analyze usage patterns of the two leading car sharing providers with over 1.2M customers
  • Wrote algorithm to automatically analyze the data, find hot spots, and show the results as a heat map
  • Developed web application for sentiment analysis of press releases

Skills/Technology: API, Python, PostgreSQL

Gut8 Real Estate Valuation (10/2014 - 12/2015)

  • Developed Objective C iOS application for real estate valuation. This enabled the company to perform paperless valuations and automatically create PDF reports
  • Designed and implemented Python web application to create maps based on Open Street Map data as part of the appendix of every report, allowing the company to create all their documents in-house and save on licensing costs
  • Developed Python module for the company’s ERP system to integrate the iOS application in the billing process, which allowed automatic billing by expenses and type of facility

Skills/Technology: iOS, Objective C, SQL, Python, Flask

GOB Software & Systeme GmbH (03/2013 - 08/2014)

  • Wrote project & bachelor’s thesis about web applications and web services to enhance Microsoft Dynamics NAV
  • Developed web application, including offline-functionality and a corresponding server application

Skills/Technology: AngularJS, ERP, HTML, Microsoft Dynamics, Javascript, CSS, C#

Sportpreis24 (01/2009 - 04/2011)

  • Designed, architected, and developed PHP \& Python based price comparison engine for sporting goods with over 100,000 unique visitors per month
  • Developed website which automatically categorized products and grouped related products based on in-house developed Naive Bayes classifier
  • Optimized website for search engines and reached the first Google search results page for several keywords

Skills/Technology: Linux, MySQL, PHP, Python, SEO, HTML, Javascript

The easiest way to contact me is via LinkedIn or Mastodon. Alternatively you can send me an email.

Last updated on Aug 22 2022.