Domenic V.-Independent Technology Leadership. I Work at Both Ends, the Org and the Code. Ex-{Spotify, Ebay}

Working as independent / interim / fractional CTO / engineering director, technical leader, builder, coach. Select achievements:

• Fractional CTO for a music-tech startup. Helped unlock further funding by providing the technical strategy and plan behind their vision and pitch deck, then executed it: vision to a working beta, 0 to 1, on time and on budget against that plan.
• AI automation for a compliance business. An annual research process — days of a person working through spreadsheets and checking websites by hand, so costly it had been abandoned for years — now runs automatically every month and takes about an hour to review. Stale or missing data became current data, twelve times a year.
• An AI development autopilot. Agents take an approved ticket, implement test-first, verify against a running system and open a pull request. An AI committee reviews on various categories and provides risk assessments based on my specs. Nothing merges without a human.
• Coaching and sparring for engineering leaders. Developing engineering managers was most of my job as a director; I now do it one to one.

Led the engineering department through a pivotal period that included a company merger, overseeing the integration of two engineering organisations:

• aligning team structures, ways of working, and culture while maintaining product delivery throughout.
• Managed 4 cross-functional teams: 3 product stream teams and 1 SRE team.
• Expanded the product scope to incorporate ML models, adapting team structure and delivery processes to support a machine learning lifecycle alongside traditional software engineering.

Joined as Principal Engineer to help scale a data-heavy customer engagement platform that was hitting serious architectural limits. Inherited a monolithic system with growing bottlenecks and systematically decomposed it into event-driven microservices, using Kafka pipelines to isolate and alleviate the most critical data processing constraints. The work restored throughput and reliability while keeping the platform live throughout.

Led technical strategy across three agile teams, advancing the architecture toward domain-driven microservices on Kubernetes, underpinned by a Kafka-based choreography model and a stack including Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Flink, Hadoop, and Kafka Streams. Embedded observability, resilience, and CI/CD practices across the engineering organisation.

When the Engineering Director departed, I was asked to step into the role.

One of my notable projects of 2017 was the introduction and continued iteration on a feature called the "feed", which presents the user with a scrollable feed of personalised items that are on offer at that time on the platform. Utilising streaming solutions based on Kafka and search technology based on Elasticsearch we were able to produce a personalised feed on the homepage for millions of users.

This work was presented at Codetalks Hamburg and Berlin Buzzwords, and documented in a published technical blog post.

Developed Scala and Java microservices with frontend support.

Key contributions:

• Enhanced in-house A/B testing tools for a unified experience across iOS, Android, and web, integrating with analytics providers for comprehensive experiment impact tracking (e.g., Google Analytics, display ads).
• Built a proof-of-concept chat/messaging app integrated into the platform as part of a small tiger team.
• Developed one of Marktplaats’ first Spark jobs to analyze logs and calculate related searches.
• Played a pivotal role in Marktplaats’ first dual-track agile, domain-driven team, driving product experimentation, fast iteration, and user-focused development.

Early joiner at very early stage startup. Part-time during my studies.

Responsible for the choices of the stack, as well as technical direction and development. Grown and built development team to a team of 4 total. Did both web development as well as server maintenance, handling deployments, and adopting an agile methodology.

One of the first (and for a while, the only) developers for this startup that was aiming to provide an online community and toolkit for open access academic publishing.

Stack: python, django, solr, postgresql, linux