I’m a hands-on engineering manager based in Munich, Germany, with 14+ years of experience building cloud platforms and distributed backend systems. I have led engineering teams since 2020 while remaining active in architecture and production delivery.
Work
Hetzner Cloud GmbH
One of Europe’s largest cloud infrastructure providers, operating its own data centers.
Team Lead, Identity & Billing
January 2023 to present | Remote, Germany
- Lead a five-engineer team responsible for authentication, authorization, and billing platforms processing more than 20 million events per day.
- Grew the team from 3 to 5 and own hiring, performance reviews, compensation, headcount budgeting, and quarterly priorities.
- Designed the roles and permissions model adopted by other products. The authorization path handles more than 2,000 requests per second across the cloud API.
- Reduced monthly invoice generation from four days to under one hour across more than 10 million line items for hundreds of thousands of customers.
- Integrated billing with SAP and additional products and pricing models.
- Designed the GDPR deletion service and a compatibility layer for zero downtime migration of legacy services.
Team Lead, Backend Engineering
November 2020 to December 2022 | Remote, Germany
- Grew the backend team from 5 to 13 engineers, redesigned the interview process, and promoted engineers into lead and manager roles.
- Led the decomposition of the original monolith into event driven services supporting more than 25 million VPS deployments, cutting API response times to one third of their previous level.
- Automated customer resource limit approvals and created specialist domain teams as the backend group grew.
Senior Software Developer
November 2016 to November 2020 | Munich, Germany
- Joined a year before public launch as the third engineer on the cloud platform, building the original provisioning, networking, account and project management, and public API systems.
- Built the billing platform in 2017 and remained its primary maintainer as customer and invoice volumes grew.
3megawatt GmbH
Lead Software Developer
August 2015 to November 2016 | Munich, Germany
- Led a four-person team that designed and launched a data intensive Python and Django SaaS platform for renewable asset management in under three months.
- Owned delivery from user requirements through architecture and release, coaching developers through design reviews, code reviews, and technical discussions.
- Operated the AWS hosted production platform, including deployments, upgrades, and backup and recovery planning.
Independent Software Consultant
Backend Developer
January 2012 to August 2015 | Remote
- Delivered Python backend systems and REST APIs for multiple clients, working from requirements and architecture through deployment and ongoing support.
- Built and performance tuned web applications and database backed services, resolving bottlenecks in existing production systems.
What I work with
I work primarily with Python, Go, PostgreSQL, Kafka, Kubernetes, and Docker. I also have experience with FastAPI, Django, Flask, Redis, RabbitMQ, GitOps, GitLab CI/CD, gRPC, REST APIs, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, and Jaeger.
Other details
I speak German (fluent), English (fluent), and Serbian (native). German citizen with unrestricted EU work authorization.
Outside of work I tinker with IoT projects (Home Assistant, MQTT), play guitar, and do film and digital photography.
Contact: nikola@nikolak.com