HiπŸ‘‹,
I'm Stein

A passionate engineer & hands-on technical leader

About me

I'm driven by a relentless passion for technology and innovation. With over 15 years of experience in the tech industry, I've embarked on a journey that's spanned pioneering startups and dynamic scale-ups, making an enduring impact in every phase.

I'm fueled by a never-ending curiosity for technology and innovation. My toolkit is a mix of Hands-on Technical Leadership, Domain Driven Design, and a bunch of programming languages. Throw in some modern frameworks and technologies, and you've got a tech cocktail that helps me tackle complex problems and craft cool solutions.

Services

Need help with a project that you are doing? Or are stuck with all of the technology choices that are out there? Maybe I can help. Below are (some) of the services that I offer.

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CTO

Is your company in need of a Chief-Technology-Officer? I could help you with the following areas.

  • Technology Strategy: Providing assistance in defining and executing a strategy that enables your business to grow through technology.
  • Team Guidance: Providing guidance and advice to optimize your internal technology team or assist in setting up a new team.
  • Innovation and Trends: Keeping business up-to-date with the latest technological trends and ensure you always stay ahead of the competition.
  • Risk Management: Identifying and mitigating technological risks that could harm your business.

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Hands-on Architect

As a hands-on IT architect, I specialize in crafting solutions tailored to your unique challenges. Whether you're seeking scalable systems or swift market-fit solutions, I prioritize simplicity, elegance, pragmatism, and quality to ensure your needs are met. Some key areas I could assist with:

  • Identity & Access Management: Having a very strong background in (Customer) Identity & Access Management, I can assist with designing / building your customer or employee IAM solution.
  • Event driven architectures: Any distributed system can heavily benefit from a well designed event-driven (async) messaging solution. In the past I have built a fully serverless event-driven architecture solution that served many services and processed billions of events.
  • Multi-tenant system design: The efficiency that multitenancy can bring you is very high. However, there are many challenges that you need to overcome when designing a multi-tenant system. Especially, when this system is a distributed system that consists of multiple (micro)services.
  • (Micro)Services architecture design: Setting the right boundaries for your (micro)services is one of the most challenging things to do right. With the experience that I bring, I can assist in making the right choices from the start and prevent a lot of problems further down the line.

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Lead / Principal / Staff engineer

As a lead / principal engineer, I can bring your entire team to the next level. There are various areas where my experience can be of help

  • Secure coding: Having a strong background in building a security product, I have a lot of experience in writing secure code.
  • Correct implementation of encryption & signing algorithms:Choosing and implementing the right encryption / signing algorithms is often (unfortunately) not an easy task.
  • Coaching peers: As an experienced professional, I guide and coach peers to enhance their skills and knowledge. This collaborative learning process can boost team productivity and lead to better software development outcomes.
  • Choosing between generic or specific: Making the right choice between specific or generic is often a challenge. Going generic too early can come with a very high price, on the other hand doing it too late i also expensive. As I have seen an organization from start-up to scale-up, I know the different phases of a company and know when to go generic and when a specific solution is the better choice.

Skills

Below, you'll find a collection of skills I've picked up and polished over time.

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Back-end Development

An expert in back-end development, my philosophy revolves around creating pragmatic and elegant solutions. I pride myself on developing lean infrastructures that maximize performance without the bloat. Always advocating for the 'right tool for the job', I ensure that every technological choice is purposeful and optimized for the task at hand.

Languages:

JavaPythonJavaScriptTypeScriptGoLangLua

Tools:

IntelliJPyCharmGitGitHubGitLabBitBucket

Frameworks:

SpringSpring BootHibernateNextJS
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Architecture

Specializing in crafting modern software architectures, I bring a proven track record of designing systems that are scalable, resilient, and extensible. Leveraging the best practices and cutting-edge technologies, I strive to build robust backbones for applications, ensuring they thrive in the most demanding environments. Your vision, powered by my architectural expertise, will drive innovation and excellence.

Tools:

MiroUMLSequence DiagramsFlow Diagrams

Frameworks:

Domain Driven DesignDesign PatternsC4
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CI/CD

In the realm of CI/CD, my focus is on creating the most efficient and developer-friendly pipelines. I harness the power of automation to ensure rapid, reliable deployments, minimizing the gap between code commits and production releases. By creating environments that resonate with developers, I streamline the integration and delivery processes, allowing teams to focus on innovation rather than operational hurdles.

Tools:

CircleCIGitHub ActionsGitLab CI
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DevOps / Cloud

Over the course of my career I have built a few Developer Platforms from scratch. These platforms enable developers to build, test, and deploy and maintain their software in a self-service manner. Kubernetes is a central part of these platforms. Hence, the Kubernetes ecosystem is something I am very familiar with. I have mostly worked with AWS, but also have experience with fully self-hosted platforms. Furthermore, I have experience with setting up and managing cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and monitoring solutions. The platforms I have worked on were all certified with certifications like SOC2 (Type 1 and 2) or ISO27001.

Tools:

AWSKubernetesTerraformDockerCloudFlareFluxCDBackstageGrafanaPrometheusLokiTempoMinIOCert-ManagerExternalDNSPostgresOpenSearchOpen Policy Agent
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(Customer) Identity & Access Management

Having built a Customer Identity and Access management solution from the ground up, I am adept at implementing and managing protocols like OIDC and OAuth. My expertise ensures seamless Single Sign-On (SSO) experiences, paired with secure Single Log-Out (SLO) processes. Navigating the intricate landscape of identity authentication and authorization, I focus on creating robust and user-friendly solutions that prioritize both security and convenience.

Standards:

OAuth 2.xOpenID ConnectSAML 2.0WS-Federation

Experience

  1. Platform engineer @ SURF (Freelance)

    For SURF, I am building an Internal Developer Platform from scratch. The platform enables developers to build, test, and deploy and maintain their software in a self-service manner. For building software, CI/CD components for a range of programming languages are available. These components standardize the build & deploy pipelines. The platform also comes with a number of templates for building applications. The DTAP environments are built as separate kubernetes clusters that come with a number of services like managed Postgres databases, Object store (MinIO) & OpenSearch. Code quality and security are paramount, with Backstage used to provide insights into these aspects. The platform is fully self-hosted. Technologies used: GitLab, Kubernetes, Docker, FluxCD, Backstage, Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, MinIO, Cert-Manager, ExternalDNS, Postgres, OpenSearch, Open Policy Agent, Renovate, and more.

  2. Fullstack engineer @ Steunpunt Levend Erfgoed (Freelance)

    As a fullstack engineer at Steunpunt Levend Erfgoed, I was responsible for the development of a new platform for pedigree management from front-end to infrastructure. Used technologies: Typescript, Python, AWS Lambda, Postgres, AWS CDK.

  3. CTO Product @ OneWelcome

    My journey at OneWelcome was continuation of an exciting journey in the world of secure identity solutions. It was a period of substantial growth and transformation, where innovation met integration head-on.

  4. CTO @ Onegini

    My journey at Onegini was a thrilling ride through the realm of Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM). We were pioneers, the first CIAM vendor in the Netherlands, making waves in the insurance market.

  5. CTO @ Innovation District

    At Innovation District, I led a tech adventure that reshaped how we approach online business security. Back in the day, CIAM (Customer Identity and Access Management) wasn't even a buzzword yet.

Contact

Interested in my profile & skills? Please send me a message. You can use either my mail address, fill in the form below or connect with me onΒ LinkedIn

[email protected]
+31 (0)6 39 110 574

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IBAN:NL21 BUNQ 2098 6384 34
BIC:BUNQNL2A
BTW:NL003922084B05