Objective

To own the architecture and roadmap of digital products that improve lives; apply appropriate solutions to problems; to build high performant, happy, cross-functional teams and empower them to build clean, maintainable software.

Career highlights

• Hands-on technology background: Built distributed large-scale web & mobile applications, including public cloud experience.
• 10+ years leading engineering teams.
• International work experience: 5 years in the Silicon Valley, 2 years in UK, 7+ years in India, 13 years in NL.
• Strong written, visual, and verbal communication.

Public Talks

• “Flirting with the Public Cloud – challenges of large enterprises in moving to the public cloud” – My talk at GOTO Amsterdam conference in June 2022 (watch it on YouTube here)
• Microservices Ecosystem – My talk at a Women in Tech virtual meetup during Covid, Aug 2020 (watch it on YouTube here)

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Recent Work Experience

Architect, ING Bank | 2018 – now

Retail Bank (ING.NL) Amsterdam, NL | 2022 – now

• Responsible for the architecture of the direct customer facing channels of ING retail bank
• Productize and rollout the mobile and web app to the other ING countries, with attention to reliability and high availability
• Explore and design for hybrid cloud setup where appropriate

Wholesale Bank (INGWB.NL) Amsterdam, NL | 2018 – 2022

• Digitize Wholesale Bank processes, integrating a process orchestrator (PEGA Systems) in Channels.
• Brought Bloomreach CMS to ING’s Technology Standards Board, got it approved for global use.
• Shape the microservices architecture of the strategic channel of Wholesale Bank.
• Evangelize the ING-wide Global “Touchpoint” Architecture within the domain for its key unifying principles: security framework for all ING’s systems, reuse of larger blocks of capabilities, UI/UX standardization.
• Develop an API Vision for moving from TIBCO JMS Services to RESTful APIs.
• Gather insights into customer actions on the Channel through machine learning data analysis.
• Participate in the public cloud initiative, specifically focusing the use of Service Meshes for container- and VM-based applications, to improve security, reliability, and observability.

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Previous Work Experience

Squla (www.squla.nl) – Amsterdam (Jan 2014 – May 2018)

Squla is an educational platform serving over 200,000 primary school children with school curriculum content in the Netherlands. It is a fun-learning environment, where educational content is offered in the form of both single and multi-player games. The platform has features for parents and teachers to follow the progress of the children.

Highlights

As team lead initially, and later as Head of Engineering, I did the following:

• Built and operated the web and mobile app for Squla for 5 countries from a single codebase, on AWS Public Cloud infrastructure
• Influenced the management to refresh the technology stack (responsible for rewriting the whole product from PHP to Python, and made it internationalized, i.e., ready for multiple countries and languages)
• Collaborated with product management, marketing, customer support, to create the best possible product.
• Together with data scientists, built a machine learning model to classify NPS customer data, and put it in an automated pipeline to production
• Build a team of skilled devops engineers and eventually game developers
• Engineering culture building: Focus on continuous improvement of code quality and automated tests, good practices like peer reviews, continuous integration, continuous automated deployment

Hyves (www.hyves.nl) – Amsterdam (Jul 2010 – Dec 2013)

Hyves was the largest online social network connecting the Netherlands, with over 10 million members, 700 million photos, and 6 billion page-views per month at its peak.

Highlights

• Part of a highly skilled engineering team, we built a high volume, high performant web application using thousands of “on-prem” web servers, load balancers, database servers and caches. Responsible for coding, testing, and deploying features (in a rotational Deploy-master role)
• Technology stack: PHP / MySql database, apache web server, Memcached, redis, Hadoop for data sharding, SMARTY template engine, automated tests, continuous integration
• Later as team lead of a small sub team, built a separate prediction game for popular Dutch TV show “Wie is de Mol”, using python/flask framework with SQLAlchemy and MYSQL db in a few weeks.
• Built a Javascript-based media browser with “text spotting” feature (placing playful text blobs on photos) using JavaScript, HTML, CSS.
• Experimented with video chat using RTMFP / RTMP protocols via a 3^rd party API (www.opentok.com)

Cisco Systems – India (Aug 2007 – May 2010)

Application Visibility Management (AVM) is a product based on a proprietary Network Mining Platform (NMP) at Cisco. AVM provides application and device level visibility into the network in an intuitive, user-friendly dashboard.

Highlights

• Versatile tech stacks in parallel: Worked on the design-time NMP Studio, written in C#, using Visual Studio 2005, and a runtime NMP application written in Java (J2EE – Servlets, JSP, Javascript, JSF, AJAX, XML, JAXB) to create a web based front end for the visibility dashboard. The studio and runtime communicated using XML and web services.
• Designed and built a network topology UI control in Java and its configurator in C#.
• Evaluated graph controls such as mxGraph (purely JS based) and yFiles (Java server-side graph generation and rendering using tiled JPG).
• Performance and Scalability Measurements (including writing some simulation tools) for the product. Tools used: JConsole, JMeter, Yourkit, JMap.

Avaya – Pune, India (Feb 2007 – Jul 2007)

Core Services are software modules that act as building blocks, which are used internally within Avaya products. The modules offer functionality such as fault management (logging, alarming), licensing, configuration, user management, role-based access control, etc.

Highlights

• Java J2EE, servlets, JSPs, JMX for messaging, Quartz open-source scheduler for scheduling jobs, Hibernate, Postgres/Oracle.
• Technical lead for two of the core services modules: Licensing and Scheduler.

DataVision – Datamate – Pune, India (Apr 2005 – Jan 2007)

Datamate is a web-based core banking solution from DataVision Software. It is aimed at the retail, corporate, and trade finance banking sectors in India. It is built in a modular fashion such that it can be deployed in a clustered and/or distributed environment, thus making it very scalable.

Highlights

• Application built in Java J2EE: EJBs deployed to JBoss or Oracle AS, JSPs, Tomcat, Oracle and MySQL.
• Technical head for Datamate Java development, leading a team of 20 developers.
• Architecting and building of a new robust framework to improve and enhance the product.
• Planning and scheduling releases to existing customers, as well as new installations.
• Incorporating productive tools in the development environment for coding, code review, and unit testing.
• Mentored a team of junior programmers, and increased their productivity through use of tools and automation.
• Setup processes in the team that led to a successful CMM Level 5 certification.

Freelancing projects – Pune, India (Jul 2003 – Mar 2005)

A series of short freelance software projects for non-profit, non-govt. organizations (NGOs). These were mostly using tools such as MSAccess on Windows, to cater to the needs of not-very-computer-savvy users at the NGOs, and one which was a conversion of PDF to HTML using C#, XML, XSLT.

Azerity – San Jose, CA, USA (Apr 1999 – Feb 2003)

ProChannel is a collaborative channel-management software solution from Azerity Software Solutions (www.azerity.com), later acquired by ModelN (http://www.modeln.com). This web-based CRM product is targeted at electronics manufacturers and distribution sales representatives, providing buyers real-time information on prices, availability, backlog, and order status.

Highlights

• ProChannel uses Java, Oracle8i, Windows OS, Apache/Tomcat, JRun.
• Programming in Java/JDBC, as well as Oracle PL/SQL Stored Procedures.
• DBA activities- created and maintained databases and schemas, performance tuned databases and SQL queries, used Oracle tools such as SQL Loader, ServerManager, etc.
• Versatile role in the startup: Played various non-development roles as needed to meet company goals: DBA, professional services apart from development.

WPDS – San Diego, CA, USA (Mar 1998 – Mar 1999)

The Government Online Data System (GOLD) is a logistics software system of WPDS, for aircraft maintenance, for customers including McDonnell Douglas, Lockheed Martin Astronautics, Motorola, and Boeing.

Highlights

Client server application development in Uniface (GUI tool) and Oracle database table design and implementation.

ICIM – Pune, India & Reading, UK (Aug 1993 – Dec 1997)

Zensar Technologies (then called International Computers India Manufacturing – ICIM).

Highlights

• OPENpas (April 1994 – July 1997, Reading, UK) – patient administration system for the health care community in UK. Technology Overview:  client-server architecture in C and Pro*C, on Windows 95, and Unix (DRS6000) platforms. Uniface 6.1 (a language for specifying forms), Oracle 7.2.3, and Tuxedo 4.2 was Transaction Manager between the client and server
• Worked as software programmer on several projects in technologies ranging from COBOL on Mainframe VME (2900) to Unix (DRS6000), to SQL Forms 4.5, SQL Reports 2.5, and Oracle 7.2.3

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Professional Timeline

Dates	Work Details	Place
June 2018 – Present	Domain Architect, ING Bank – Wholesale Bank Channels – Retail Bank NL Channels	Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Jan 2014 – May 2018	Head of Engineering, Squla	Amsterdam, The Netherlands
July 2010 – Dec 2013	Software Engineer, then Team Lead, Hyves	Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Aug 2007 – May 2010	Cisco Systems	Pune, India
Feb 2007 – Jul 2007	Avaya India Ltd.	Pune, India
Apr 2005 – Jan 2007	DataVision Ltd.	Pune, India
July 2003 – Mar 2005	Freelancing projects	Pune, India
Apr 1999 – Feb 2003	Azerity	San Jose, CA, USA
Mar 1998 – Mar 1999	WPDS	La Jolla (San Diego), CA, USA
Aug 1993 – Dec 1997	ICIM (now Zensar Technologies)	Pune, India