I’m Johannes, a freelance software architect and engineering lead with special interest in cloud applications. For 10 years, I’ve been working with startups and enterprises to leverage the power of cloud-native services to launch and transform their applications.
Recent reference case
Launched multimedia streaming service within six months
As the lead architect for a multimedia streaming service, my goal was to launch an Ad Video on Demand (AVoD) and live TV service from scratch on all major consumer platforms within six months.
- Built a serverless streaming platform with > 99.99 % monthly availability for VoD, live TV and event streaming (ingest, transcoding, packaging, distribution).
- Successfully launched the streaming service on the top seven consumer platforms within six months with 100,000+ VoD assets and 60+ live channels. Subsequently, added several additional platforms and doubled the content.
- Created a new revenue stream with dynamic ad insertion while maintaining the perceived ad load for the user. Extended existing broadcast workflows for accurate content stitching.
- Designed a system that outperforms state-of-the-art broadcast experiences (playback lifecycle, channel switching, monetization) and ensures quality metrics remain excellent even during high-profile events.
- Built and managed two DevOps teams from scratch to scale the service and ensure 24/7 on-call operations.
- Launched content protection systems on all platforms to enable Subscription Video on Demand (SVoD) capabilities for Hollywood studio content.
This streaming platform serves millions of active users in Europe and has been battle-tested during several high-profile sporting events.
Expertise
- Design, implementation and operation of HLS and DASH streaming platforms for Video on Demand and Live
- Multi-CDN (Content Delivery Network) strategies and “last-mile” optimization
- Audio/video encoding, file transfer and storage management
- Player integration on all major browsers, mobile and OTT platforms
- End-to-end client-side (CSAI) and server-side ad insertion (SSAI/DAI) workflows
- Cross-functional engineering team building and management, vendor management and project management
- High-volume event and 24/7 broadcast capacity planning
- Digital Rights Management (DRM) implementation
- Quality of Experience (QoE) monitoring
- Product-centric and data-driven leadership
Focus areas
Cloud architecture
Expertise
- Infrastructure design for scalable multi-region applications
- Migration and integration of on-premises workloads
- Technical leadership for large-scale cloud projects
- Cost optimization and monitoring
- Performance and availability optimization
- Cloud security and compliance, including Identity and Access Management (IAM), encryption and network security
- Infrastructure automation using CI/CD and Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC)
- Product-centric and data-driven leadership, mentoring and coaching
Tech stack
- Infrastructure Automation: Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CDK
- Compute: Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, Amazon ECS, AWS Fargate
- Databases & Storages: Amazon RDS, Amazon Aurora, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon DocumentDB (MongoDB), Amazon S3, Amazon ElastiCache (Redis), Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, Amazon Kinesis
- Networking: Amazon VPC, Amazon Route53, Amazon DirectConnect
- API Gateways: Nginx, Traefik, Apache HTTPd, Amazon API Gateway
- CDN & Content Distribution: Amazon CloudFront, Akamai, Fastly, Varnish, Apache Traffic Server
- Containers: Docker, Kubernetes
- CI/CD: GitLab, GitHub, Jenkins, GitOps methodology
- Monitoring: Kibana, Grafana, DataDog, Sentry, Dynatrace, Amazon CloudWatch
- Paradigms: Distributed Systems, Domain-Driven Design, Twelve-Factor-App
Software engineering
Expertise
- Application design for RESTful, service-oriented (SOA) and event-driven (EDA) architectures
- Technical leadership for cross-functional software projects
- Design and implementation of microservices, serverless applications and modular monoliths
- Design and implementation of browser-based applications and applications for resource-constrained environments
- Relational and non-relational database management, storage management
- Test, build and deployment automation using CI/CD, blue/green, canary releasing and feature flagging
- Product-centric and data-driven leadership, mentoring and coaching
Tech stack
- Languages: Go, Java/Kotlin, TypeScript/JavaScript
- Frameworks: Gin, Spring Framework/Spring Boot, ReactJS, NextJS, Express
- Databases: Postgres, MySQL/MariaDB, MongoDB, DynamoDB, Redis, InfluxDB
- ORMs & ODMs: Mongoose, TypeORM, Gorm, Exposed
- Messaging: Apache Kafka, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, Amazon EventBridge
- Testing: Jest, Sinon, Playwright, JUnit, Kotest, Mockk
- CI/CD: GitLab, GitHub, Jenkins
- Paradigms: Domain-Driven Design, Object-Oriented Programming, Functional Programming
Work history
eee-safe: Custom Threema Safe server
terraform-provider-aws: Terraform AWS provider
Find more public contributions on GitHub
Certifications & education
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional
- Certified Widevine DRM Implementation Partner (CWIP)
- Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.), IT Management (Wirtschaftsinformatik) at FOM University of Applied Sciences for Economics and Management
Availability
I speak German (native) and English (fluent). I prefer to work remotely and am located in Munich, Germany. If you have interesting challenges, let's get in touch.