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 infrastructure engineers and am the technical owner of the cloud infrastructure that supports internal product teams and deployments with global top pharma and lifesciences companies
• Design, implementation and delivery of customer-managed execution environments (Apheris Compute Gateway), spanning infrastructure components and Kubernetes controllers, enabling customers to run sensitive workloads in their own environments without exposing raw data
• 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 the existing infrastructure as code setup for google cloud and implementation of a new gitops system for an increased deployment velocity for the developer productivity engineering team

• Automated provisioning and maintenance of production and pre-production kubernetes clusters on Google Kubernetes Engine
• 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

• Implementation of kubernetes based hosting and continuous delivery system for a fleet of > 40 distinct services over multiple environments
• Setup and operation of cryptocurrency nodes, including a full archive Ethereum node that pushed Google Cloud Platform to its performance limits, 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
• Extensive vendoring of the entirety of the systems dependencies to protect against supply chain attacks

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

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

• Development of a platform for analytical simulations, model training and backtesting enabling Fraugster to train models on credit card transaction data in multiple jurisdictions
• Migration of the main engine to a container orchestrator (docker, kubernetes)
• Leading job interviews for software engineers and site reliability engineers (~100 interviews)

Senior Software Engineer at Aroundhome (Remote / Berlin, Germany)

I built the operations function and was in charge of the maintenance and evolution of the infrastructure and reliability

• Implementation of configuration management and operation of 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 of monitoring infrastructure (capable of handling sustained 3k events/s), bootstrapping work on relibility and leading to a reduction of reliability issues by ~40% (logstash, elasticsearch, kibana, graphite)
• Prototyping and rollout of a container based application server cluster and deployment infrastructure (coreos, kubernetes, docker, golang)

Software Engineer at Aroundhome (Berlin, Germany)

Driving modernization initiatives for a Ruby on Rails monolith

• Development of 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
• Implementation of a numeric simulation based approach for automated search engine advertisement (ruby, mysql) in collaboration with the BI team, reducing initial simulation time from ~6h to ~30min over two major iterations
• 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

• Development and maintenance of a mainframe based middleware to interface a legacy COBOL based insurance system with Java application servers, used by 3 country subsidiaries (IBM CICS and CTG)
• Coordination 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 technical implementation in the context of the Autonomic Network Architecture Project (Information Society Technology, FP6) for the competence center Network Research

• Design of an adaptive monitoring system for ANA, specification and implementation of network-monitoring components (linux kernel, c99)
• Representation of the project at the ICT 2008, attendance to project-meetings and work 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)