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Portrait

Curriculum Vitae

Alexander Orlov

Strengths

  • Team work & social dynamics experience
  • Experienced team lead and product manager
  • Project management, MVP-driven solution delivery, customer & stakeholder communication, and escalation management experience
  • Successful in evolutionary transforming bad projects & products for the better
  • Experienced working in a multitude of industries, company sizes & cultures
  • Grasping new patterns, paradigms & technologies
  • Research & investigation of solutions for tough problems
  • Entrepreneurial spirit
  • Distributed systems & API design
  • DevOps: CI, deployment & product lifecycle of cloud-native applications
  Alex has been the linchpin in providing valuable technical guidance across numerous teams at Fastly, encompassing Security Solutions, TAMs, Sales Engineers, and the CSOC. He has relentlessly tackled some of our most intricate technical challenges related to NGWAF deployment, often being the final point of escalation due to his deep expertise and unwavering dedication.
— Richard Singh, Security Solutions Engineering Manager at Fastly

  Alexander is an extremely bright, highly motivated developer at hybris. He contributes regularly to open source projects and is very widely read and knowledgeable. [...] he is enormously appreciated by the Scrum Master, and his team mates find him a great member of the team.
— Ken Lomax, Head of Software Development at SAP Hybris

  Alex is a great addition to any engineering team. He is enthusiastic and thrives on tackling difficult technical challenges. He always seems to know more about a topic than most people, yet is inquisitive to find out what others know too. He loves to evangelize ideas for how to improve a design or strategy. Alex is a hard worker, an expert programmer, and definitely a big win for your team.
— Armin Hopp, Founder and President of digital publishing AG
  My technology showcase & project portfolio on GitHub [click to view]

Career and Education

Career
Since 03/2023: Principal Solutions Architect for Edge Cloud Security at Fastly remote from Munich

Enabling companies to serve their customers and provide their services in a safe, reliable, and secure manner. Delivering solutions to protect against various threats and attack vectors, incl. hybrid layer 7 DDoS attacks that digital service providers need to withstand without compromising on service quality and latency. Exemplifying the DevSecOps culture and providing guidance and advisory on how to seamlessly deploy & operate WAF security components in heterogeneous IT environments incl. Kubernetes.

06/2021 - 02/2023: Senior Solutions Architect for Edge Cloud Security at Fastly remote from Munich

Enabling companies to serve their customers and provide their services in a safe, reliable, and secure manner. Delivering solutions to protect against various threats and attack vectors, incl. hybrid layer 7 DDoS attacks that digital service providers need to withstand without compromising on service quality and latency. Exemplifying the DevSecOps culture and providing guidance and advisory on how to seamlessly deploy & operate WAF security components in heterogeneous IT environments incl. Kubernetes.

07/2020 - 05/2021: Solutions Architect at Qualtrics remote from Munich

Identifying challenges, scoping solutions, and estimating & pricing solution deliveries. Serving as the central hub for engineering and consultancy service delivery. Designing & executing service delivery strategies to maximize value delivery for clients. Providing Account Executives with service delivery models to accommodate use cases for existing and new clients by providing suitable service delivery models.

Staying up-to-date with enterprise IT landscapes & technologies to better understand client's needs and scoping solutions that just solve the business challenges that matter to executives and other decision makers.

07/2018 - 07/2020: Lead for SaaS & Legal Tech at IntraFind Software AG in Munich

Leading the development of Contract Analyzer, an AI-powered solution that gives law firms the flexibility and speed they need, to find what is crucial in thousand-page contracts. Acting as an internal entrepreneur and leveraging the Kanban methodology to readjust priority and product development focus on a daily basis in a highly volatile environment.

Supporting the development team with hands-on DevOps/SRE operations and line management duties in a project-driven business environment. Building an automatization CD pipeline to massively reduce deployment & delivery costs for new managed/hosted customer deployments and enable other company departments to leverage the corresponding infrastructure to reduce their operation costs, keeping ISO 27001 & ISAE 3402 in mind. Reporting directly to the CEO to reduce the business strategy turnaround speed and speedup business pivot capabilities. Supporting the CEO with pragmatic pre-sales activities, talking to stakeholders to figure out the absolute minimum MVP solution and resolving escalations.

Making the product development operationally capable of working with offshore & nearshore contractors (incl. sourcing, recruiting, and hiring), yet overcome the risks of outsourcing for the product development and service operations. This way serving as a business development accelerator within the own company.

07/2017 - 07/2018: Team Lead for SaaS & Cloud at IntraFind Software AG in Munich

Building a managed on-demand enterprise search product that is partly OSS.

Actively building and operating (DevOps) a managed on-demand B2B website search product, partly built as OSS. Conducting product demos to acquire customers, pitching the product, and igniting product excitement. Supporting customers to integrate the Site Search product, leveraging co-innovation practices. Building and maintaining operational infrastructure and enhancing the product with general non-functional requirements. Working closely with marketing, sales, and business development departments to make the product a commercial success. And further propagating agile & lean software development principles across the departments. Involved in pre-sales activities to boost general feature development according to specific customer use cases and to facilitate customer acquisition.
Leading the product development & DevOps and working with HR to grow the product development & operations team. Pragmatic hands-on development mentality*, with a proven record of success enabled the product to go from zero to the first paying customer in just six months! *acting also as "Manager of one" -- Rework, J. Fried & D. Heinemeier Hansson

04/2015 - 06/2017: Senior Software Developer, 01/2013 - 03/2015: Software Developer at SAP Hybris in Munich

Development of HATEOAS/RESTful web services as microservices, on top of CloudFoundry operated as SaaS. Conceptual work on solutions to improve continuous delivery and co-engineering features with product management. Community of Practice Lead for code quality introducing new technologies to enhance productivity. [2014 - 2017]

Development of Cockpit NG, a backoffice framework used to build platform-agnostic backoffice applications based on widgets. [01/2013 - 01/2014]
Development of HATEOAS/RESTful web services as microservices, on top of CloudFoundry operated as SaaS. Conceptual work on solutions to improve continuous delivery and co-engineering features with product management. Community of Practice Lead for code quality introducing new technologies to enhance productivity. [since 01/2014]
  • Application of the containerization technology Docker to simplify stack deployments.
  • Implementing backend-side business logic for “YaaS Market” (SAP’s official shipping channel for subscription based services)
  • Working with frontend (AngularJS) developers to enable usage of our backend APIs
  • Decisive work on the implementation of four ecommerce microservices from the concept to their public release
  • Introducing JVM language Kotlin to promote a more concise and type-safe implementation of microservices
  • VisualVM for continious monitoring and especially profiling
  • Experience with Graphite/Riemann for service monitoring
  • Assure code quality using SonarQube
  • Application of rxjava to enable asynchronous request processing in microservices
  • Application of the circuit breaker pattern to enable resilience in microservices
  • Actively applying best practices of Scrum & Agile engineering
  • Leveraging Java 8’ functional programming paradigm to write concise code
  • Participation in various security trainings & workshops
  • Development of Spring Boot powered applications deployed to Cloud Foundry
  • API-first development leveraging integration tests with other teams’ web services
  • Leverage of Jenkins & TeamCity as CI tools
  • Conducting technical interviews for engineering positions
  • Developed microservices implementing corresponding business logic
    • Order Service
    • Customer Account Service
    • High level mashup service for order processing
On-premise platform engineering
  • JIRA issue tracker to manage tasks, track issues & release schedule plans
  • Bamboo CI for company refeference builds & deployments / TeamCity as team-internal CI for a maximum of control & flexibility
  • TDD using JUnit
  • Mockito mocking framework
  • Presentations & screencasts about proof-of-concept showcases, and tools & technology.
  • Git DVCS as project repository
  • JMeter for tracking performance regressions
  • VMware CloudFoundry PaaS as cloud deployment platform
  • Development of a platform-agnostic UI Framework, intended to be used by partners to build backoffice web applications (Cockpit NG Framework)
    • using ZK Web UI Component Framework as a web component framework
    • Selenium Framework to TDD UI
    • Mercurial DVCS to collaborate with team members
    • Subversion to colaborate on older projects
09/2012 - 01/2013: Team Lead at xSolut GmbH in Munich Letter of Recommendation

Development of an EU law implementing web application using GWT, iBatis & Oracle RDBMS. Taking over responsibility for DevOps, requirement elaboration & specification, and hands-on implementation.
Development of an EU law implementing web application using GWT, iBatis & Oracle RDBMS. Taking over responsibility for DevOps, requirement elaboration & specification, and hands-on implementation.
  • CI-driven build generation, deployment & lifecycle management
  • JIRA issue tracker to manage tasks, track issues & release schedule plans
  • Team coordination & development process definition (Scrum Master)
  • Oracle 11g RDBMS & Windows Server administration
    • CI / TeamCity
    • Tomcat
    • Oracle 11g
  • Smart GWT component framework for an RIA frontend
  • Spring Framework as wiring helper
  • iBatis persistence framework as RDBMS to Java mapper
  • JUnit test framework for regression prevention
02/2011 — 09/2012: Software Developer at digital publishing AG in Munich Recommendation, Letter of Recommendation

Architectural design & implementation of a multi-language & multi-timezone ERP web application using GWT/JPA.
Architectural design & implementation of a multi-language & multi-timezone ERP web application using GWT/JPA.
  • JPA / EclipseLink as persistence framework
    • JPQL
  • GWT with RequestFactory as front- / back-end data binding
    • Usage of asynchronous programming concepts & patterns
    • multi time zone / multi locale (L10n) / multi language (I18n) support
    • client-side custom timezone support
    • Cell Widgets as scalable data containers
    • CssResource and usage of CSS “variables” for coherent design&layout
    • GWTTestCase, a specific JUnit derivate to TDD UI-level functionality
    • Activities & Places (comprehensive/strong MVP) to enable app-level “navigation” and history support
    • Editor API to dynamically couple UI to the model
  • Vaadin (“server-side, pure Java” GWT) for generic UI tasks
  • Tomcat as Servlet Container
  • IntelliJ IDEA as the primary team IDE
    • Utilization of debugging techniques using breakpoints and assertions
  • Firebird as SQL RDBMS
  • Maven for replicable build generation and CI
  • JUnit Test Framework for regression prevention
  • Chrome Developer Tools to understand GWT/RequestFactory
  • TeamCity as CI
09/2010 – 01/2011: Working Student as Project Assistant at Cirquent Consulting in Munich

Project coordination, framework assessment and backing of an automotive industry project at two German universities.
  • Coordination of an automotive aftersales platform prototype for BMW and Daimler as a joint venture project with two German universities
    • Elaboration of a functional specification document
    • Research and review of appropriate Java-based ECMs and ERPs
    • Raw data preparation for students (reduction of complexity to the most relevant parts)
    • Project introduction talks at partaking universities
    • Spring Roo as framework for an own prototype
    • Lucene/Solr search infrastructure usage
10/2009 – 04/2010: Working Student as Software Developer at Bertelsmann / arvato systems in Munich (Reference: 1st/2 p. , 2nd/2 p. )

Implementation of an e-publishing & e-book web application’s encryption module.
  • Assistance in development of a CRM/CMS for publishers
    • Java/Groovy as programming languages
    • JUnit Test Framework for application logic
    • WebTest for UI unit tests
    • MySQL as database
    • Spring as web framework
    • Hibernate as persistence layer
    • Eclipse/IntelliJ IDEA as IDEs
    • Subversion as SCM
    • Creation of bash scripts for Linux cron jobs
    • Extensions for the Ant Build Management System
04/2008 – 09/2009: Working Student as Software Developer at Cortal Consors in Nuremberg ( Reference)

Implementation of an internally used effort estimation web application.
  • Development of a Java Web Application
    • Oracle database
    • Hibernate as persistence layer
    • Application of GWT for the Web UI
    • Application of JSP for basic forms and UI
    • Java as programming language
    • Eclipse/NetBeans as IDEs
    • Subversion/SVN SCM
    • Optimization and extension of Ant build scripts
09/2006 – 04/2008: Working Student as Software Developer at Siemens Medical Solutions in Erlangen (Reference: 1st/2 p. , 2nd/2 p. )

Implementation of code quality statistics related tools using .NET/C#.
  • Development of report tools for and in .NET/C#
    • IBM Relational ClearCase as DSCM
    • MS VS 2005/2008 IDE
    • Scrum as software management method
    • XSLT and C# as programming language
    • Application of CSS and XHTML for presentation
04/2005 – 09/2005: Private tutor in Mathematics

Supporting high school students to improve their grades through exercises.
  • tutoring within a private study group
10/2004 – 03/2005: Practical part of the University of Cooperative Education study: Web Developer at Siteforum in Erfurt

Implementation of a help desk web application from scratch.
  • Decisive development of a helpdesk web application
    • Application of a proprietary PHP-like scripting language
    • MySQL and PostgreSQL as databases
    • Application of regular expressions for mail categorization
University
07/2010 – 03/2011: Study of Computer Linguistics and Philosophy (M.A., 10-11th semester) at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
  • Emphases: Logic and Ontology, computer-driven processing of the natural language
10/2005 – 03/2010: Study of Philosophy and Sociology (M.A., 9 semesters) at Friedrich Alexander University of Erlangen Nuremberg
  • Preliminary Examination degree (comparable to BA)
  • Emphases: Logic, Media and Communication, Organization Systems
10/2004 – 03/2005: Study of Information and Communication Technologies (Diploma) at the University of Cooperative Education Eisenach
Basic Military Service
07/2003 – 04/2004 Basic Military Service in Haidhausen and Munich
High School Grad.
2003 — German Abitur, Allgemeine Hochschulreife

Qualifications and Interests

Expertise
Books that influenced the way I build products & services, write code, and discover business opportunities
  • The Lean Startup, Eric Ries
  • Rework, J. Fried & D. Heinemeier Hansson
  • Clean Code, Robert C. Martin
  • The Manager's Path, Camille Fournier
  • The Clean Coder, Robert C. Martin
  • Effective Java, Joshua Bloch
  • Continuously reading various Pivotal booklets about IT & software engineering
Basic knowledge & familiarity with following technologies [click to view]
  • Programming languages: C#/ASP.NET, C/C++, and Go
  • Scripting languages: PHP, Perl, and Ruby
  • Google Chrome Extension development
  • Machine learning methods & AI
Good and advanced knowledge of following technologies [click to view]
  • Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows
    • Virtualization technologies VMware and Xen
    • Administration of dedicated Linux servers
  • Blockchain implementations
  • Software Development
    • Java Technologies
      • Programming languages: Java, Scala, and Groovy
      • Google Web Toolkit, GWT web UI framework
      • Objectify persistence framework for the GAE datastore
      • JavaFX, Swing
      • Google App Engine (GAE cloud web application framework)
      • Database persistence frameworks: Hibernate and JPA
    • Software Development Concepts and Paradigms
      • Test Driven Development and QA through JUnit, ScalaTest/Specs and Selenium/WebTest
      • Agile Software Development
        • Scrum, Kanban
      • OO Programming and UML
      • Automatization of complex software build, deployment and delivery processes with Ant
      • Collaboration Tools
        • SCM: Subversion/SVN
        • DSCM: Mercurial and Git
        • JIRA (Ticket/Issue Tracking Application)
    • Python
    • Android Application Development (published app)
    • Google APIs usage within Chrome Extension and general web application development
    • Gradle & Maven
    • Oracle PL/SQL
    • Chrome Developer Tools
    • UI & Frontend Development
      • HTML5 / CSS3 / JavaScript
  • Structured presentation of content and information
    • XML/XSD, XSLT/XPath, JSON
    • Text processing with regular expressions
    • LaTeX
Languages [click to view]
  • English (fluent)
  • German (native level)
  • Latin (Latinum level)
Interests
  • Media Technology
  • Universal, generic and open problem solutions
  • Media culture
    • Information synthesis out of data and knowledge organization
    • Social networks and collaboration concepts
  • Economy and the blockchain technology
  • Sports: running, tennis, badminton, squash
Engagement
Contributions to various Open Source Software projects [click to view]