Backend Developer in Hamburg

traigo is VTG's digital rail logistics and fleet management platform. It processes large volumes of telemetry, mileage, geofence, sensor and wagon-movement events in near real time and provides operational services for rail logistics customers across Europe.

As part of Team Customer Selfcare, I worked on the design, implementation, optimisation and operation of large-scale backend services and event-driven processing pipelines — covering both feature development and operational ownership of business-critical production systems. I also regularly acted as first responder for production incidents, data inconsistencies and performance investigations across multiple distributed services.

• Design and implementation of event-driven backend services.
• Migration and replacement of legacy processing pipelines.
• Development of replay / rebuild mechanisms for large event datasets.
• High-throughput asynchronous event processing on SNS / SQS.
• Database and query optimisation for PostgreSQL and DynamoDB.
• Design of scalable read / write models and aggregation pipelines.
• Production troubleshooting and operational support.
• Performance tuning and infrastructure scaling.
• Design and stabilisation of integration and system tests.
• Technical concepts, architecture documentation, and cross-team collaboration.
• Support the further development of existing GitLab CI/CD pipelines

Geofence & Wagon Stay Processing

• Algorithm to detect vehicles within geofences (entry, exit, dwell time).
• Event sourcing with guaranteed chronological order within the affected time window.
• Refactored geofence event and wagon-stay processing logic for performance.
• Resolved race conditions and event-ordering problems in distributed services; server-side filtering, aggregation and optimised query pipelines.
• Repair and replay tooling for corrupted or inconsistent movement data.

Fleet Metadata & Mileage

• Modernised the service; migrated storage from DynamoDB to PostgreSQL to improve traceability and accelerate new features.
• Scalable mileage aggregation and replay mechanisms.
• Read / write models and optimised queries for high-volume mileage calculations.

Sensor & Telematics Integration

• Integrated telemetry and sensor processing pipelines.
• Snapshot and state-calculation logic for sensor systems.
• APIs and persistence models for wagon sensor data; data-quality improvements.
• Further development of a service using gRPC for intra-service communication.

Movement Segment Processing & Routing

• Migrated services to new movement-segment event streams.
• Built replay and rebuild tooling for segment correction.
• Optimised throughput and reliability for high-volume event processing.

Condition Monitoring & Wagon Analytics

• APIs and backend services for wagon condition monitoring.
• Brake-wear prediction processing and wagon analytics functionality.
• PostgreSQL views and optimised query models for operational dashboards.

Operational Reliability - First Responder

• Investigated production incidents and distributed-system failures; DLQ analysis, replay and operational recovery.
• Tuned database performance and AWS infrastructure under production load.
• Improved observability, monitoring and operational tooling.
• Supported rollout strategies, monitoring and post-deployment stabilisation.

• Developed a complete solution for ethics committees and medical associations, from application submission to approval
• Integrated a DICOM viewer to display medical images (CT, MRI)
• Implemented a file system with folder and subfolder structures
• Identified and fixed security vulnerabilities
• Improved code quality and application performance
• Maintained customer servers

• Creation of a platform where schools can run competitions to collect e-waste or old textiles
• Development of a shared PHP backend for administration by the client
• Connection of two separate WordPress sites via REST API
• Development of a custom WordPress theme with an extensive login area for students
• Setup of normally editable content pages using Elementor

• Technical consulting to meet regulatory MiCA requirements for a digital trading platform
• Design and development of backend components and APIs to comply with transparency and auditability requirements
• Optimization of core functions in order execution and market data delivery with a focus on performance and reliability under high load
• Conducting job interviews and structured onboarding of new developers
• Successful and timely implementation of the regulatory MiCA requirements, ensuring uninterrupted operations
• Reduction of user issues and common support requests by fixing complex backend problems
• Strengthening the development team through effective onboarding, mentoring, and knowledge sharing

• Several projects in a police context
• Model and document police procedures/projects with Archimate (as-is/to-be) in the context of P20 (BKA)
• Create software architectures with microservices
• POC development with Springboot/Docker/Kubernetes
• Project size: 10 people
• Enterprise architecture management with Togaf and Archimate
• Backend software development Springboot
• DevOps with Kubernetes
• Implemented using: Java 17/21, Springboot 3, P20 architecture, Togaf, Archimate

• Further development of the online shop
• IT environment: Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, Postgres, AWS, Git, Continuous Deployment, Kubernetes, SLIM