Jiri Pokorny, Developer in Prague, Czech Republic
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Jiri Pokorny

Concurrency Developer

Prague, Czech Republic

Toptal member since April 9, 2021

Bio

Jiri is a software engineer who focuses on concurrency, data pipelines, and distributed architectures. He values clean, readable code and thoughtful abstractions that manage complexity. Committed to ownership, Jiri builds reliable, observable, and well-tested systems and enjoys collaborating with curious, kind people to create meaningful software.

Portfolio

Second Foundation
Kotlin, Kotlin Flows, Azure, Gradle, Grafana, Python 3, Coroutines, Solace
Open Bean
Scala, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), AWS Lambda, Akka Streams, Akka, Kubernetes...
Second Foundation
Kotlin, Coroutines, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, Solace, JVM, Trading Systems...

Experience

  • Concurrency - 10 years
  • JVM - 10 years
  • Scala - 3 years
  • Apache Spark - 3 years
  • Big Data - 3 years
  • Python - 2 years
  • Coroutines - 1 year
  • Kotlin - 1 year

Preferred Environment

Linux, IntelliJ IDEA, Scala, JVM, Big Data, Kotlin, Data Engineering

The most amazing...

...thing I've discovered was functional programming, which made my code much more reliable, readable, and concise, even in non-functional languages.

Work Experience

Senior Software Developer

2022 - 2024
Second Foundation
  • Acted as core developer of an algorithmic trading agent on energy markets.
  • Extended core framework for new features, led major refactorings, pinpointed and resolved bugs.
  • Contributed to system design and implemented new protocol features across distributed components.
Technologies: Kotlin, Kotlin Flows, Azure, Gradle, Grafana, Python 3, Coroutines, Solace

Senior Software Developer

2020 - 2022
Open Bean
  • Developed a raw data ingestion pipeline using Scala, Amazon S3, and Lambda.
  • Designed a flexible raw data format for diverse business use cases.
  • Architected an index structure and library to accelerate queries and enable downstream distributed computations.
  • Led onboarding of new data provider, negotiated specifications, acceptance, and integration debugging.
Technologies: Scala, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), AWS Lambda, Akka Streams, Akka, Kubernetes, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR), SBT, Apache Spark, Spark SQL, Data Engineering

Senior Software Developer

2020 - 2020
Second Foundation
  • Developed a real-time market trading adapter for normalizing market operations for multiple use-cases.
  • Participated in internal system design and protocols between distributed components.
  • Developed a system for scraping of published data on various web pages.
Technologies: Kotlin, Coroutines, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, Solace, JVM, Trading Systems, Distributed Systems

Senior Software Developer

2017 - 2020
Jumpshot
  • Served as the lead developer of the processing pipeline for internal platforms used throughout the company.
  • Implemented a custom Spark job scheduling service for continuously applying patterns to data. This allowed for scaling out the computation to keep strict delivery deadlines.
  • Optimized recalculation algorithms to speed up the computation by an order of magnitude.
  • Implemented a safe mechanism of mutable data publication on HDFS using snapshotting. This prevented consumer errors and allowed for safe synchronization between clusters.
  • Improved service reliability, resiliency, and monitoring.
  • Redesigned the pipeline for processing search engine results, improved source code, and participated in improving data quality.
  • Led, on occasion, several other developers on associated tasks.
Technologies: Apache Spark, Scala, Akka Actors, Concurrency, MongoDB, HDFS, Python, Gradle, Spark SQL, Hadoop, Data Engineering, Big Data

Technical Lead

2012 - 2016
ZOOM International
  • Implemented live screen monitoring into existing screen monitoring solutions.
  • Developed integrations with an external system for call recording.
  • Participated in complex bug fixing of business-critical applications.
Technologies: Java, JVM, Multithreading, Linux, Python, Bash

Experience

Pattern Application System

This project was responsible for applying patterns to large-scale data. I was the main developer on this project. Patterns themselves were a moving target, updated several times a day, and had a deadline when they had to be applied to all the historical data from the time of their publication.

As updates mutated the resulting data, there had to be a safe publishing mechanism on HDFS and safe synchronization to other clusters. There was a service to expose the current status of patterns for consumers. The pattern application was costly—there was an algorithm to limit the recalculation to just specific parts. Another interesting aspect of this service was the resiliency and the effort to minimize the chances of disrupting the computation by a single bad batch/pattern.

The service was a Scala-based application with multiple concurrent Spark jobs spawned into the Cloudera cluster. It used Scala futures and Akka Actors for concurrency handling and MongoDB to persist global computation state and track job states. An HTTP API and a CLI tool controlled various aspects of the running system.

Metrostation Prague

https://github.com/pr0chz/metrostation
A small application to notify users of the current station in Prague metro in the notification bar on Android phone. Prague metro was specific as it had cell signal just in stations—this application exploited that and used a list of GSM cell ids to track and predict the movement of the user. Now the application is outdated as metro tunnels are being covered with signals, and I did not continue with development, but still, it was a nice little hobby project.

Education

2001 - 2008

Master's Degree in Computer Science

Czech Technical University in Prague - Prague, Czech Republic

Skills

Libraries/APIs

Akka Streams, Kotlin Flows

Tools

IntelliJ IDEA, RabbitMQ, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR), SBT, Spark SQL, Gradle, Grafana

Languages

Scala, Kotlin, Python, Java, Bash, Python 3

Frameworks

Apache Spark, Akka, Hadoop

Platforms

Linux, JVM, Android, AWS Lambda, Kubernetes, Azure

Storage

MongoDB, HDFS, PostgreSQL, Amazon S3 (AWS S3)

Industry Expertise

Trading Systems

Other

Big Data, Concurrency, Coroutines, Multithreading, Computer Science, Akka Actors, Solace, Distributed Systems, Data Engineering

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