Eduard Schäli
At the helm of the engineering division for three of Switzerland’s premier online marketplaces—Tutti.ch, Anibis.ch, and Ricardo.ch—I collaborate closely with the CPO and CEO to translate our vision and strategy into tangible improvements for our customers. Spearheading a vibrant team of nearly 100 engineers spread across seven countries, I ensure that our brilliant people have a system of work and technology that enables them to deliver excellent solutions consistently and are aligned with our strategic targets.
Highlights:
As the CTO of Ricardo.ch, I was responsible for the entire engineering organization, which includes over 50 employees spread out over five countries. The platform processes over 1 billion CHF in transactions every year, serving around 4 million customers. In my time at Ricardo.ch in 2021 I focused on improving our stack’s reliability, identifying bottlenecks in our legacy services, and re-designed our engineering organization to provide improved functional support to our cross-functional product development teams.
Highlights: Successfully led 50 engineers remotely in Switzerland, France, Serbia, Poland and England. Found and introduced new ways to scale our legacy platform and improve developer experience without negatively affecting daily business. Introduced SLOs as a way to better inform our cross-functional team’s decisions on adding new features vs improving existing services.
To enable the efficient development of new data and SaaS products, I have focused my efforts on building a small but effective SRE team in Serbia. We specialize in building fully automated deployment pipelines and robust tools that empower developers and data scientists to add business value, even when faced with extreme amounts of data and traffic. Our strong focus on automation has proven to be a force multiplier, enabling us to do more with less.
Highlights: Our platform processes ~1.7 billion requests per month for the data science team. >250 fully automated deployments across multiple Kubernetes clusters.
I founded a new department that provides highly available SaaS products within the TX Group. Department head, project manager, and leading an SRE/Infrastructure team in Belgrade.
Technology: AWS, k8s, authentication (OpenID Connect via Keycloak), and real-time messaging. Python, Java (Spring Boot) and React front end.
Technical consultant and engineering manager for the TX Group, working directly for the group CTO on special projects.
Highlights: Prototyping new software, infrastructure, and processes for TX Group subsidiaries. Software and infrastructure architecture reviews with CTOs and department leads. Interim technical lead/head of engineering/CTO for the TX Group in various departments. Technical due diligence analysis for M&A projects across Europe. Workshops and coaching for product and software development. Organizer of the TX tech conference (>400 attendees). Interviewing and hiring engineers, and growing teams in Switzerland and Serbia.
Team lead for the web team, working in a cross-functional and highly agile setup. Major milestones were the introduction of a data-driven approach to understanding how our users interact with the product and improving the speed of developer tools, which greatly reduced the time we had available for NERF wars. Line manager for >10 software engineers
Technology: Ruby on Rails, Linux, Bash, Docker
Worked on the web app (local.ch) and its APIs, which were mostly built in Ruby on Rails, serving the swiss phonebook to 4.5 million unique users per month. Running sprints for the whole team and enabling architecture changes with engineers from other departments. Introduced containerization to the whole company in 2013. Directly responsible for the development of new products through initiatives (new listing models) and side-projects (hardware evaluation buttons for businesses)
Technology: Ruby on Rails, Linux, Bash
Developed and maintained train planning systems for the swiss cargo rail network in the train stations Basel and Chiasso. Extended and maintained the existing 30-year-old system (approx. 300k lines of C code running on military-grade mainframes), which interacted with radar and weight measurement devices on the tracks. In my time working for Swiss cargo I improved the working relationship with our customer, introduced new train-length calculations to the legacy C codebase, and caused one traffic jam in Basel.
Technology: Ruby on Rails, Linux, Stratus VOS Mainframes, C
Fitness tracking and lifestyle startup. Responsible for product and software development. Initiated the pivot to RunningCoach which is Quevita’s most successful product. Created design and initial prototype and pitched to the board.
Technology: Ruby on Rails, Linux, XEN
Custom webshops and websites with the LAMP stack. Developed a webshop extension product for Microsoft Dynamics (ASP.NET). My work on SOAP web services, which enabled Microsoft Dynamics Webshops to communicate in real-time with their ERP backends, directly led to Object dynamiX being acquired by MGA, and later by redIT.
Technology: MS SQL, C#, ASP.NET, PHP, ActionScript
Together with work colleagues at the TX Group, I developed a simple robotic drawing platform, which we use to teach children how to code. We aimed to build the robot as cheaply as possible (we needed 20 of them).
The functions to control the robot are modeled on the turtle graphics library (translated to Swiss German).
The project can be found on Github. Some impressions from one of our teaching events can be found on Twitter.
The Tamatisse project inspired me to go a bit further down the use-robotics-to-paint-stuff rabbit hole, which led me to the wonderfully frustrating world of pen plotters. I enjoy finding and implementing mathematical conjectures and formulas, which allow for interesting generative patterns and shapes:
Eduard Schäli Luzern, Switzerland eduard@schaeli.com
Technical leadership, product development, business & technical strategy, SRE/DevOps, software and infrastructure architecture for distributed systems, agile software development, tech due diligence for M&A.
Python, Ruby (and Rails), Bash, Vim, C (extremely rusty, no pun intended), Clojure (learning), Linux, AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Terraform, Fusion360 (CAD),
Vintage sci-fi books, music, cooking, horology, generative art & design, pen plotters. PS: Tell your dog I said hi.
Fluent in English and German/Swiss German (bilingual), Secondary school French.
Personal Site Github
