
Florian Pfisterer
Verified Expert in Engineering
Back-end Developer
Munich, Bavaria, Germany
Toptal member since July 12, 2021
Florian has over five years of experience in back-end software engineering. He is skilled in Java, AWS, Node.js, SQL, and Python, with a focus on scalable cloud infrastructure, fast algorithms, and clean API design. In addition to a recent SE internship at a big tech company, in Florian's previous job, he led a team of five remote contractors and in-house developers. His industry experience is backed by a bachelor's degree in computer science from KIT and CMU.
Portfolio
Experience
- Databases - 5 years
- Algorithms - 5 years
- Python - 4 years
- SQL - 4 years
- TypeScript - 3 years
- Node.js - 3 years
- Stripe - 3 years
Availability
Preferred Environment
MacOS, GitHub, Amazon Web Services (AWS), TypeScript, Node.js, Python, SQL, Linux, Java
The most amazing...
...thing I've worked on is the core infrastructure of HubSpot's extremely scalable sending pipeline and webhook processing system.
Work Experience
Software Engineering Intern
HubSpot
- Developed a robust acceptance test infrastructure that monitors the correct functioning of core business priorities.
- Worked on a highly scalable microservice architecture using Kafka, Apache HBase, and AWS SQS.
- Designed and built a Cloudflare edge worker to correctly route incoming requests.
Lead Software Engineer
PLAYSPORTS GmbH
- Architected a scalable cloud architecture with multiple databases on AWS, including CI/CD pipelines, autoscaling, a load balancer, and AWS Lambda.
- Developed a clearly documented Node.js, TypeScript, and Express.js REST API with cron jobs, job queues, Redis caches, WebSockets, and complex SQL queries.
- Created a unit and end-to-end test suite with Mocha to automatically test all critical endpoints and features.
- Built two microservices in Python for machine learning and natural language processing tasks that provide recommendations, automatic tagging, and matching.
- Integrated with diverse third-party APIs, including Stripe, Google Maps, Google BigQuery, Firebase Analytics, and Quaderno.
- Constructed a resilient payment system for subscriptions, deferred one-time payments, coupons, and invoicing based on Stripe.
- Led the technical aspects in a sports app startup, built the tech culture and established software engineering standards, onboarded seven new developers, and performed code reviews and sprint planning.
- Implemented the parts, maintained, and conducted code reviews for two React web apps and admin dashboards.
Visiting Research Scholar
Carnegie Mellon University
- Conducted natural language processing research on the semantic parsing of instructional texts, such as cooking recipes and DIY guides, and based my bachelor's thesis on the research.
- Developed automation tools, parsers, and converters in Python, some of which can be found on my GitHub profile.
- Ran machine learning experiments and training on remote Linux servers.
Assistant Researcher
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
- Developed a 2D-LSTM for sequence-to-sequence learning in PyTorch from scratch as a research project (see GitHub).
- Conducted neural machine translation experiments and training on remote Linux servers with GPUs.
- Created a detailed unit test suite for the PyTorch 2D-LSTM model.
- Wrote a detailed report about the research project.
Co-founder and Developer
Courtastic
- Developed a REST API back-end for a court booking application on DigitalOcean Linux servers, accessing a MySQL database.
- Designed and developed a native iOS app with over 2,500 users in two countries. Built with Swift with a REST client, custom views, and authentication.
- Founded the company, which PLAYSPORTS GmbH acquired in January 2019.
- Maintained a React web app and a Bootstrap HTML and CSS landing page.
- Marketed and sold the product used by 22 tennis clubs in Germany and Austria.
Experience
PLAYSPORTS Back End
Automatic Tagging Microservice
Graph-based Recommendation System
Personal Blog About AWS and Server Architecture
https://pfisterer.devContainerized Microservices Architecture on Azure
https://electrojoule.chEducation
Master's Degree in Computer Science
Technical University Munich - Munich, Germany
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology - Karlsruhe, Germany
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Node.js, Stripe, REST APIs, Redis Queue, React, Twilio API, NumPy
Tools
GitHub, PyCharm, NGINX, Celery, Azure IoT Hub, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
Languages
TypeScript, Python, SQL, JavaScript, Java, Swift, HTML
Paradigms
REST, API Architecture, Testing, DevOps, Microservices Architecture, Mobile App Design, Microservices
Platforms
MacOS, AWS Lambda, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon EC2, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Linux, Twilio, DigitalOcean, iOS, Netlify, Apache Kafka, Azure, Docker
Storage
Databases, JSON, Redis, MongoDB, MySQL, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Amazon DynamoDB, Redis Cache, SQLite, HBase
Frameworks
Next.js, Stripes
Other
Algorithms, Software Engineering, APIs, JSON REST APIs, Back-end, Webhooks, Mathematics, Machine Learning, CI/CD Pipelines, Message Queues, Architecture, Cloud, Lambda Functions, Scripting, API Integration, RESTful Microservices, Web Security, Monitoring, Exports, Decision Trees, Research, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Mobile App Development, Back-end Development, Team Management, Scalable Architecture, WebSockets, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Distributed Systems, Metrics, Netdata, Cloud Infrastructure, Containers, Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT)
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