Christoph Mertz

Staff Engineer at Apheris AI GmbH (Berlin / Remote)

Building a secure platform for distributed computations to enable federated learning in regulated and IP sensitive industries

• Having built the infrastructure function at Apheris, I currently lead a team of 3 engineers and am the technical owner of the companies cloud infrastructure that supports our engineering teams and deployments of the Apheris FCP product with global top pharma and lifesciences companies
• Designed, implemented and delivered customer-managed execution environments (Apheris Gateway), spanning infrastructure components and Kubernetes controllers, enabling customers to run sensitive workloads in their own environments without ever exposing data and underpinning Apheris'es data networks
• Scaled cloud infrastructure from MVP to production platform, standardizing infrastructure-as-code and deployment patterns to support multi-region deployments
• Drove the introduction and adoption of Go as first-class language for development by seeding adoption via a champions group, introducing shared components, and running recurring internal training, leading to organization-wide usage
• Influenced engineering quality and hiring by leading interview loops (> 70 interviews) across multiple engineering functions and onboarding new engineers

Cloud Engineer / DevOps Engineer for Kiwigrid GmbH (Freelance, Remote)

Modernization of infrastructure as code setup for google cloud and implementation of a gitops system for the developer productivity engineering team

• Automated provisioning and maintenance of production and pre-production kubernetes clusters on Google Kubernetes Engine; led workshops to onboard a broader infrastructure team
• Implemented a gitops system for kubernetes to replace an aging fleet of Jenkins servers (flux2, golang), including automated migration of kubernetes workloads and debugging and removal of performance bottlenecks and throughput issues in the gitops system
• Designed and implemented automated kubernetes manifest validation of some 500k lines of manifests for development teams, slashing defect rates by a factor of 4

Lead Cloud Engineer for elearnio GmbH (Freelance, Remote)

Provided elearnio with a standardized and automated delivery system and cloud infrastructure, enabling high delivery velocity; optimized for operator time and cloud spend

Lead Infrastructure Engineer for Shuttle Holdings (Freelance, Remote)

Infrastructure development for a white-label cryptocurrency exchange product

• Implemented a kubernetes based hosting and continuous delivery system for a fleet of > 40 distinct services over 5 distinct environments
• Setup and operated cryptocurrency nodes, notably a full archive Ethereum node that pushed Google Cloud Platform to its performance limits at the time, one of fewer than ten such nodes operating worldwide in 2018
• Build a highly available Kx Systems KDB+ based ticker system for cryptocurrency pairs, the first such deployment on a hyperscaler
• Air gapped builds with extensive vendoring of system dependencies to protect against supply chain attacks

Senior Software Engineer at Fraugster Ltd. (Berlin, Germany)

Development of a massively parallel online scoring system for online fraud detection of credit card transactions

• Developed a platform for analytical simulations, model training and backtesting that enabled Fraugster to train models on distributed credit card transaction data in multiple jurisdictions
• Migrated the main engine to a container orchestrator (docker, kubernetes)
• Led job interviews for software engineers and site reliability engineers (~100 interviews)

Senior Software Engineer at Aroundhome (Berlin, Germany)

Building an operations and reliability engineering function, and maintenance and evolution of the companys infrastructure

• Implemented configuration management and operated the application server cluster (~60 bare metal servers) and the company's load-balancers and reverse proxys serving ~200 support staff and customers of the company
• Setup monitoring infrastructure capable of handling sustained 3k events/s and bootstrapped work on relibility, which led to a reduction of reliability issues by ~40% (logstash, elasticsearch, kibana, graphite)
• Led the move to containerized applications and subsequently to a container based orchestration and deployment infrastructure, driving efficiency gains and automation along the way (coreos, kubernetes, docker, golang)

Software Engineer at Aroundhome (Berlin, Germany)

Modernization of a Ruby on Rails backend system

• Developed a high volume service for matching end customer requests to vendor offers focused on optimizing for customer preferences and global revenue optimization (~300rps during working hours), driving an > 20% reduction in online advertisment spend
• Implemented a numeric simulation based approach for automated search engine advertisement (ruby, mysql) in collaboration with the BI team, subsequently reducing initial simulation time from ~6h to ~30min over two major iterations. The automation led to both a reduction in advertisement spend and an increase in revenue by tapping into underserved customer groups
• Coordination of university student projects and onboarding and mentoring of junior developers

Software Engineer at Verti Versicherung AG (Teltow, Germany)

Development of an IBM mainframe based multi-tier insurance system

• Developed and maintained a mainframe based middleware to interface a COBOL based insurance system (Huon) with Java application servers, used to drive the entire transaction volume for 3 country subsidiaries (IBM CICS and CTG)
• Coordinated between development teams of Direct Line Italy and RBS insurance India

Student research assistant at the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems (Berlin, Germany)

In charge of the technical implementation in the context of the Autonomic Network Architecture Project (Information Society Technology, FP6) for the competence center Network Research

• Designed an adaptive monitoring system for ANA, including specification and implementation of network-monitoring components (linux kernel, c99)
• Represented the project at the ICT 2008, attended project-meetings with partners abroad and worked on deliverables for the EU

Intern at IBM Deutschland Research & Development GmbH (Böblingen, Germany)

Development of a system to automate deployments of VM based environments for build verification tests in software development hosted on VMware clusters backed by DS4000 SANs, replacing a test farm of ~100 physical workstations

Systems administrator at ubuntu-eu.org (Remote)

Hosting and administration for european ubuntu locoteams, notably ubuntu-fr.org and ubuntuusers.de, with about 150.000 unique visitors a day

Software Developer for Anterist+Schneider Automotive GmbH (Freelance, Saarlouis, Germany)

Intern at IKS, communal IT service provider for the city of Saarbrücken (Germany)

Intern at Anterist+Schneider GmbH (Saarbrücken, Germany)