Curriculum Vitæ

Employment

Netdata (June 2021 – Present, Athens – Remote)

Netdata is a observability and troubleshooting platform offering high-fidelity data, real-time, opinionated visualizations, reliable alerts, anomaly detection for every metric, and a monitoring experience that works out of the box.

• Joined as VP of Technology, providing technical direction to software engineers and SREs on Netdata Cloud, as well as being responsible for the technical architecture of current and future Netdata features.
• Designed, lead, and co-developed the Netdata event feed architecture, including the definition of an event ontology based on Elastic Common Schema.
• Designed and architected a new future connection model between the Netdata Agent, browser, and intermediary services, based on WebRTC technologies.
• Initiated transformation of metrics handling based on open standards like OpenTelemetry and OpenMetrics.

Nuntians (September 2021 – Present, Veldhoven)

Through Nuntians (owner and founder), I contract work as independent software developer and technical lead.

Elastic (October 2019 – May 2021, Amsterdam – Partially Remote)

Elastic is the company behind the Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash, Beats), the basis for its Enterprise Search, Observability and Security solutions. Its Cloud team focuses on running Elastic's products in public cloud (Elastic Cloud, the official Elasticsearch Service) and private cloud (Elastic Cloud Enterprise and Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes).

• Joined as Principle Engineer Ⅱ, with a role as Technical Lead in the Networking and Orchestration areas in the Cloud team, providing technical direction to software engineers and collaborating with other areas and SRE.
• Pushed for and guided disabling of support for TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1.
• Guided migration from Classic to Network Load Balancers in AWS, as part of the launch of support for AWS PrivateLink.
• Wrote technical documents for the implementation of vanity URL handling, AWS PrivateLink, container configuration, TCP, HTTP, HTTP/2.0 handling. Researched PKI support. Most of these concern the Proxy, custom written in Go, sits in front of all APIs offered by the Elastic products in customer deployments, both in public and private clouds.
• Collaborated on the (re)design of the architecture of Cloud.
• Assisted and performed detailed problem analysis and debugging of networking issues, including TCP keepalives and blocking write lockups.

VEON (April 2016 – Present, Amsterdam – Partially Remote)

VEON is a communications and internet provider, and was the name of its personal internet platform. The VEON Platform included a mobile app offering Chat, VoIP, and personalized news, entertainment, and offers, as well as an open marketplace for partners.

• Joined as Chat Expert, assisting contractors with initial implementation, released for WIND Italy in November 2016.
• Architected and rolled out self-care to 5 countries.
• Additionally took on task for setting up initial server infrastructure at AWS, including logging, monitoring and alerting (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, Kafka, Prometheus, Pagerduty, StatusPage).
• Hired and lead Infrastructure Team of 9 people.
• Coached and then handed off team to one of the team members.
• Hired 5 XMPP backend and Jingle/WebRTC developers as core of new Realtime Communications team.
• Lead Realtime Communications Team as Manager of Realtime Communications Engineering, incl. additional 6 frontend (Android/iOS) developers.
• Point of contact with Legal and Cyber Security teams for VEON implementation and architecture.
• Designed and architected federated XMPP infrastructure for call signaling, one-on-one and multi-user chat, replacing the earlier proprietary solution, including APIs for third parties (merchants).
• Selected and created XMPP Extension Protocols for rich messaging.
• Design, architect, and implement events ontology and infrastructure for providing high-level insight in user activities for support and problem discovery, use for reporting, monitoring, and alerting, as well as providing them to VEON operating companies for providing rewards (e.g. bonus data bundle) based on user activity. Then handed this over to the analytics team.

Mailgun / Rackspace (May 2013 – April 2016, San Francisco – Remote)

Mailgun is a (transactional) email service for developers. During my employment it was part of Rackspace, the leading managed cloud company. As Software Engineer, I have been responsible for a variety of Mailgun's back-end services, most notably:

• Setting up and maintaining our event logging infrastucture, for customer-facing logs as well as internal application logs.
• Setting up internal metrics infrastructure and Jenkins CI/CD pipelines.
• Managing our cloud infrastructure, including writing/improving a large number of Chef recipes/cookbooks, and setting up the integration with Rackspace Cloud Monitoring.

Mochi Media (December 2011 – March 2013, San Francisco – Remote)

Mochi Media was the largest online games network in the world. They provided products and services for managing the distribution of games, to track usage and support in-game advertising and micro-transactions. As Platform Engineer I was responsible for maintaining and improving the Python and Erlang based back-end systems for serving up ads and supporting services. I moved ETL jobs for log processing and reporting from Vertica to Hadoop/HBase, enhanced the centralized logging infrastruture and standardized Python application logging and created UDPLog, and introduced emitting and graphing application metrics.

The logging and graphing projects proved to significantly cut down on the amount of effort and time needed to track down issues and allow us to detect new problems faster. Besides that we were able to cut down on technical debt by replacing or removing related existing custom code and suboptimal services.

Mediamatic Lab (November 2007 – December 2011, Amsterdam – Partially Remote)

Mediamatic Lab was a company that built web-based social networks, communities and connections with the physical world. The social networks are built on top of the Community Management System anyMeta. My role was to architect and implement new features for websites running anyMeta. A large part of these has been to connect 60 social networking sites into a single federation using open technologies like Atom, OpenID, OAuth, XRDS and Jabber/XMPP. Related physical world projects involved RFID and Arduino controller boards. Parts of these enhancements have been built using Twisted in Python.

Jaiku (March 2007 – October 2007, Helsinki – Remote)

Jaiku was the name of an online service that was developed by a company with the same name, prior to being acquired by Google in October 2007. The service provided users the ability to share their online presence and location with other people, and keep them updated on new photos, trips, blog entries and other social objects they create within other services. All these updates are aggregated into a so-called activity streams. Aspects of Jaiku have influenced what eventually grew to be Google Plus

Besides the website, the service could be accessed through a mobile client for Nokia Series 60 phones, a mobile version of the website, SMS and Instant Messaging (IM). As Software Engineer, my work focused on the IM interface, based on Jabber/XMPP and more general backend programming on top of Twisted, a framework for networked applications in Python. I was also involved with developing a way to let the service interoperate with other social networking services using open protocols and formats, such as XMPP and Atom, in a near-real time fashion.