After the successful launch of the first version of the integrated product, I took over management of a distributed feature team, consisting of frontend, backend, and QA engineers, currently focussing on all things segmentation & search, including entity detection, rules, custom classifiers, and categories in Brandwatch Consumer Research.

Responsibilities in addition to my continued role as a backend developer include line management of my team members and closer collaboration with product owners, UX researchers, designers and delivery managers in all phases of our projects.

The Senior Software Engineer promotion followed an intense year of work leading up to the launch of the new Consumer Research product in October 2019, integrating the former Brandwatch Analytics and Crimson Hexagon Forsight products following our merger in November 2018.

I led a backend sub-team of three developers responsible to re-engineer parts of our trend detection system in order to achieve much higher scalability, now easily coping with data throughput that is ~35 times higher, and not being even close to its limit. The main technologies used to achieve this were Spring, Redis, Kafka, and Postgres.

After successful delivery of the re-engineered system, my main focus was to integrate parts of the two image detection products of Brandwatch and Crimson, involving daily collaboration with fellow backend developers in Brighton and Boston, both remote and on-site. Main technologies used are Ratpack, Spring, and Solr.

As a backend developer at Brandwatch I was part of two international teams, allocated in Germany, England, Argentina, and the US, striving to improve the Brandwatch Analytics experience for our users as part of the Applications division in our Engineering department.

Improving existing and developing new services to achieve that goal includes API and crawler development around the Spring Framework, Kafka, Solr, Postgres, and Zookeeper; image recognition, various machine learning works around word embeddings, topic detection, emotion detection, and full responsibility for the product from planning and architectural design, to developing, unit & integration testing, deployment, and support.

I have acted as a mentor and was involved in the hiring processes, including multiple interview stages and the review of technical tasks, of several new developers in our office. I was co-supervisor of a Master's thesis in cooperation with the Media University Stuttgart, authored by Felix Heck, with the title "Gossip Insights - A Graph-based Keyword Extraction & Visualisation for Contextual Analyses of Social Media Trends".

Tools and technologies I am or have been working with include Avro, Ansible, Bash, Behave Framework & Gherkin, Docker & Docker Compose, Git & GitHub, IntelliJ, Java, Jenkins, Kafka, Maven, Mockito, Nexus Repository, OpenStack, PostgreSQL, Python, Redis, Scala, Spring Framework, Solr, Spark, Swagger UI, Zookeeper, and others.