This note is archived. I am not currently looking for a new job.

I am looking for a role as a senior/staff engineer (backend focus) working on high-volume, high-availability systems.

I currently live in Berlin, Germany.¹¹1 I’d love to live and work in London one day. There’s much to love about that city, but I’d need an employer willing to sponsor a UK skilled worker visa for me.  A remote-first role would be ideal.

Keywords: Ruby / Rails / Go (Golang) / AWS / Terraform / Type­Script / React / full-time / remote-first

Links: CV / portfolio / contact

What do I offer?

Primarily, I am a highly experienced backend engineer. I excel at development with Ruby (18+ years of experience), typically with Ruby on Rails. I have significant experience with both microservices and monoliths. I am also comfortable with other languages, such as Go and Swift. I fit into the “Solver” staff engineer archetype.

I also am proficient in frontend development (primarily React and Type­Script) and infrastructure/platform work (primarily AWS and Terraform).

Lastly, I have proven experience with technical writing and public speaking.

What are my credentials?

I have worked for companies like BCG Digital Ventures and Shopify. The most impact I’ve had was at SoundCloud, where I built the policy engine — the critical core of the creator monetisation program.

I have recently worked at several startups where the work was less glamorous but nonetheless impactful, e.g. by reducing time to release by 50×, or virtually eliminating the multi-day overhead of setting up a local dev environment.

I am the creator of Nanoc, a mature and established static-site generator (SSG) that has played a central role in bringing SSGs to the mainstream. It has been used at GitHub and GitLab. It is over 18 years old, still maintained, and still in active use.

I led the development of closecontact, a privacy-first solution for contact sharing, endorsed by the Berlin Clubcommission.

My Ruby gems have over 21 million downloads, with thousands of repositories depending on my open-source code.

I have written in-depth articles and spoken at conferences and meetups. See more details on my CV and my portfolio.

What sort of work do I love?

There are a few core types of work that I love:

• I love building products and features that have direct customer impact.

• I love digging deep into complex problems of any kind, whether it is identifying and fixing mysterious database latency issues, preparing to scale 10× or more, resolving memory leaks, or reducing algorithmic complexity.

There are also some areas that I am curious about: programming language development (parsers, interpreters, compilers and the like) and desktop app development (macOS and AppKit/SwiftUI).

What do I need?

While there is some room for negotiation, this is the setup I am looking for:

• Remote-first. I’m most productive at home, in part facilitated by my excellent workstation setup.

• Be able to work from Germany or the UK. It is a dream to live and work in London, but for the UK, I will need a Skilled Worker visa.

• Full-time employment. The standard 40 hours per week.

Get in touch

If this sounds interesting, do get in touch via email or through my LinkedIn profile.

Grab a copy of my CV if you haven’t already.