Martin Bechtle
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Developer
Palermo, Province of Palermo, Italy
Toptal member since December 2, 2019
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
Experience
Availability
Preferred Environment
Amazon Web Services (AWS), GoLand, Git, Go, IntelliJ IDEA, MacOS
The most amazing...
...project was leading the back-end team as a tech lead and CTO replacement at the Tide company.
Work Experience
Senior Back-end Engineer
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.
Senior Back-end Engineer | Squad Lead
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.
Chief Technology Officer
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).
Tech Lead
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.
Back-end Lead Engineer
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.
Software Architect | Software Developer
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.
Full-stack Web Developer
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.
Experience
Tide Bank
http://www.tide.co/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
CTS | Merck Manuals
https://www.msdmanuals.com/professionalBookingbility
https://it.bookingbility.com/Sainsbury's
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
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science Engineering
Palermo University - Palermo, Italy
Certifications
Oracle Certified Java Associate
Oracle
Skills
Libraries/APIs
REST API, Node.js, Terragrunt
Tools
Terraform, CircleCI, Jira, Apache, IntelliJ IDEA, Git, GoLand, Jenkins, Kibana, Istio, Helm, Grafana
Languages
Go, Java, Kotlin, Java, PHP, HTML5, CSS3, TypeScript, CSS, JavaScript, HTML
Frameworks
Hibernate, Spring, JUnit, Mockito, gRPC, Symfony, ZK, Spock
Paradigms
REST, RESTful Development, Microservices Architecture, Agile Development, Continuous Integration (CI), Agile Development, Agile Development
Platforms
AWS, Kubernetes, Cloud Engineering, MacOS, Firebase, Apache Kafka
Storage
Amazon S3, MySQL, Amazon Aurora, AWS, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, MongoDB
Industry Expertise
Banking Consulting
Other
APIs, Fintech Development, Medical Translation, Technical Hiring, Payment APIs, Card Payments, Team Management, ECS, GitHub Actions, Prometheus, Web Development, Digital Marketing
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