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Martin Bechtle
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Developer
Palermo, Province of Palermo, Italy
Toptal member since December 2, 2019
Bio
Specializing in agile transformation, DevOps, cloud platforms, microservices architecture, and API engineering, Martin has nearly a decade of experience as a software engineer, architect, tech lead, and CTO in fintech, banking, translations, and publications with an international clientele. He works closely with developers and stakeholders, his favorite platforms are AWS and GCP, and his go-to languages are Java, Kotlin, and Go.
Portfolio
Beat
RESTful Development, REST APIs, APIs, Payment APIs, REST...
Sainsbury
RESTful Development, REST APIs, APIs, Payment APIs, REST...
Squirrel Financial Wellbeing
RESTful Development, REST APIs, APIs, REST, Team Management...
Experience
- MySQL - 10 years
- Java - 10 years
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) - 8 years
- Test-driven Development (TDD) - 5 years
- Microservices Architecture - 5 years
- Spring - 5 years
- Terraform - 2 years
- Go - 2 years
Work Experience
Senior Back-end Engineer
2020 - PRESENT
Beat
- Outlined architecture for migrating payment acquiring logic (cash and card) from an existing monolith into microservices.
- Delivered cash payment acquisition flow, in collaboration with my team members.
- Was responsible for cross-team communication in the payments domain.
Technologies: RESTful Development, REST APIs, APIs, Payment APIs, REST, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microservices Architecture, Banking & Finance, Continuous Integration (CI), Git, Continuous Deployment, Terraform, Terragrunt, Apache Kafka, gRPC, Spock, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Helm, Istio, MySQL, Amazon Aurora, Kubernetes, Go
Senior Back-end Engineer | Squad Lead
2020 - 2020
Sainsbury
- Determined microservice architecture for the company's new centralized identity system.
- Reduced test pipelines duration by more than 90% with Spring Boot tests optimization.
- Filled gap between dev and platform team for migration to Kubernetes.
Technologies: RESTful Development, REST APIs, APIs, Payment APIs, REST, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microservices Architecture, Continuous Integration (CI), Git, Continuous Deployment, Behavior-driven Development (BDD), Java 8, Kubernetes, Elasticsearch, Kibana, ECS, Mockito, JUnit, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Amazon DynamoDB, Spock, Jenkins, Java
Chief Technology Officer
2019 - 2019
Squirrel Financial Wellbeing
- Defined a new version of the personal finance management product with the CEO and product owners.
- Estimated the feasibility and timelines of a new version of a fintech product.
- Consulted on the uses of the Google cloud platform and pushed for obtaining credits for free usage.
- Performed hands-on coding of the initial MVP.
- Led the interactions with the mobile developer and defined mobile technologies (React Native, Firebase).
Technologies: RESTful Development, REST APIs, APIs, REST, Team Management, Microservices Architecture, Continuous Integration (CI), Technical Hiring, Git, Continuous Deployment, Firebase, MySQL, Kubernetes, Terraform, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Go
Tech Lead
2018 - 2019
Infinity Works Consulting
- Built the infrastructure from scratch on AWS with Terraform.
- Hired front-end and back-end engineers.
- Actively developed a back-end API through microservices on Kubernetes.
- Built CI pipeline, established engineering practices, and participated in the product definition with product managers and company directors at the client site.
- Supported other teams on best practices regarding infrastructure, architecture, and agile methodologies through tech talks and direct consulting.
Technologies: RESTful Development, REST APIs, APIs, REST, Team Management, Microservices Architecture, Banking & Finance, Continuous Integration (CI), Technical Hiring, Git, Apache Avro, Continuous Deployment, Behavior-driven Development (BDD), Java 8, Amazon Web Services (AWS), gRPC, Grafana, Prometheus, Terraform, Spring, Kotlin, Kubernetes
Back-end Lead Engineer
2016 - 2018
Tide Platform
- Hired 20 among back-end, full-stack, and web developers in London and Sofia.
- Directly reported to chief officers during CTO's absence of various months and participated in critical product and vendor decisions.
- Was directly involved in the development of the initial MVP that led to a $14-million Series A round.
- Refactored a raw Java project into Spring-service-oriented architecture.
- Achieved automated test coverage up from 10% to 80%.
- Reduced test/deploy cycle from three weeks to 15 minutes.
- Contributed to banking integrations and payments processing development and architecture.
- Developed real-time currency conversion capabilities on the banking platform.
Technologies: RESTful Development, REST APIs, APIs, REST, Team Management, Microservices Architecture, Fintech, Banking & Finance, Continuous Integration (CI), Technical Hiring, Git, Continuous Deployment, Behavior-driven Development (BDD), Java 8, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon Aurora, MySQL, Hibernate, Spring, Java
Software Architect | Software Developer
2015 - 2016
Avalia
- Managed the project and performed quality assurance for building a real estate web platform.
- Built an online payment gateway using the German banking protocol, HBCI/FinTS.
- Integrated the payments processor GPS.
- Built tools for digital publications such as XML transformations.
- Managed relationships with different clients specifically about project bootstrapping and architecture.
Technologies: RESTful Development, REST APIs, APIs, Payment APIs, REST, Team Management, Fintech, Banking & Finance, Hibernate, Git, Web Development, Java 8, Node.js, MongoDB, MySQL, Symfony, Spring, TypeScript, CSS3, HTML5, PHP, JavaScript, Java
Full-stack Web Developer
2011 - 2015
Freelance Work
- Built an online translation platform currently used by Merck.
- Managed translation projects.
- Served as a project manager of the book publishing projects, the Merck Manuals.
- Implemented tools for statistical analysis and quality management of translation.
- Developed tools for live rendering of digital publication and XML conversions.
- Interacted face to face and remotely with the client's customers in Milan, Paris, and the US.
Technologies: PostgreSQL, Git, Web Development, MySQL, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, Spring, ZK, Java
Project History
Tide Bank
http://www.tide.co/Tide Bank is a revolutionary, fully digital banking product for UK businesses. I joined a team of five as a lead back-end engineer and helped grow the company to 120 people. I hired more than 20 engineers, replaced the CTO after he left, interacted daily with product owners on different aspects of the platform.
Tide is a digital bank offering a current account that can be opened in just a few minutes, by automating identity verification and using banking APIs, then issuing debit cards to verified companies.
It offers accounts in different currencies, as well as live currency conversions.
Tide is a digital bank offering a current account that can be opened in just a few minutes, by automating identity verification and using banking APIs, then issuing debit cards to verified companies.
It offers accounts in different currencies, as well as live currency conversions.
Beat Rides
Beat is a ride-hailing app in Greece and Latin America. It has grown a lot in the last few years and now represents one of Uber's main competitors, even taking the lead in some countries. Martin was involved in the payments team to automate driver payments and layout the architecture for splitting the monolith logic into microservices.
CTS | Merck Manuals
https://www.msdmanuals.com/professionalThe CTS (cooperative translation system) is a software used by a US pharma company (Merck), in its publishing department. Every six months or so, the new English text is translated concurrently in many different languages by hundreds of translators around the world on this online platform, then published on the web.
Bookingbility
I developed an online hotel booking system with special features for disabled people.
Sainsbury's
I worked on Sainsbury's identity and login management system, as well as experimental (not public) fintech projects.
Sainsbury's is Britain's second-largest retailer, and I joined them as a tech lead in their headquarters in London as an InfinityWorks consultant.
Sainsbury's is Britain's second-largest retailer, and I joined them as a tech lead in their headquarters in London as an InfinityWorks consultant.
Card Compact
I built the online back end for cardholders of Card Compact.
Education
2005 - 2011
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science Engineering
Palermo University - Palermo, Italy
Certifications
JUNE 2015 - PRESENT
Oracle Certified Java Associate
Oracle
Skills
Libraries/APIs
REST APIs, Node.js, Terragrunt
Tools
Terraform, CircleCI, Jira, Apache Avro, IntelliJ IDEA, Git, GoLand, Jenkins, Kibana, Istio, Helm, Grafana
Languages
Go, Java 8, Kotlin, Java, PHP, HTML5, CSS3, TypeScript, CSS, JavaScript, HTML
Frameworks
Hibernate, Spring, JUnit, Mockito, gRPC, Symfony, ZK, Spock
Paradigms
REST, RESTful Development, Microservices Architecture, Test-driven Development (TDD), Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Deployment, Behavior-driven Development (BDD)
Platforms
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Kubernetes, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), MacOS, Firebase, Apache Kafka
Storage
Amazon S3 (AWS S3), MySQL, Amazon Aurora, Amazon DynamoDB, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, MongoDB
Industry Expertise
Banking & Finance
Other
APIs, Fintech, Medical Translation, Technical Hiring, Payment APIs, Card Payments, Team Management, ECS, GitHub Actions, Prometheus, Web Development, Digital Publishing
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