Curriculum vitae

Jan Brauer
Thadenstr. 56
22767 Hamburg

Tel: +491778101913
Mail: mail@janbrauer.com

TL;DR

Twenty years of building, shipping and running software, the last nine co-founding an AWS consultancy. Polyglot: Java, Go, TypeScript, Python, Ruby, Clojure, PHP, JavaScript, a bit of C++. Comfortable at either end of the stack: backend by preference, frontend when it needs doing, CI and testing because nothing ships without them. Data and databases from MySQL sharding to DynamoDB single-table design to Kafka. Cloud, AWS and Linux enthusiast since long before it was a job title. I like hard problems, and I like leaving the solution with the team that has to live with it.

How I roll

I like things fast. I’m easily bored. I like to think about what’s next. I have no clue about frontend. I’m easily excited and contagiously exciting. Customer value first. No software is better than no software. I enjoy baking. I play drums. I suck at playing keyboards. I have kids. I enjoy hard problems. I hate working alone. I say yes but no a lot. I once gave a talk. I collect reggae vinyl. And cook books.

Work Experience

2017 - 2026 superluminar GmbH

Co-founder and managing director. Set the technical direction of the consultancy, which practices we built and which bets we took, while staying hands-on throughout: architecture, implementation, knowledge transfer. Grew the team to 20 at peak. Drove the company’s AWS partner accreditation end to end: Advanced Consulting Partner status plus Generative AI Services, Migration & Modernization and DevOps Competencies.

Platform and multi-account

• Multi-account AWS foundations for a European retail group: automated account onboarding via Step Functions and CloudFormation StackSets, and HIPAA-aligned isolation for their US market entry: separate organization, organization-wide SCPs, shared identity provider, egress allow-listing.
• Migrated a European mobility provider from sprawling CloudFormation to AWS CDK with a shared construct library; transactional email on SES; established their multi-account structure.
• Kubernetes and serverless platform work at both, at the retail group untangling an inherited toolchain of Ansible-wrapped Terraform and Concourse CI onto a coherent AWS-native setup.
• Built and open-sourced super-eks, a batteries-included EKS installer.

Data and streaming

• Introduced Amazon MSK at a high-traffic online marketplace and delivered the AWS foundation for their event-sourcing architecture; contributed MSK and self-managed Kafka Lambda event sources upstream to the AWS CDK. The hard part was IAM credentials and their distribution across accounts for many teams.
• Rewrote the sports analytics API behind a European sports media platform: event-driven match ingest and scheduling, DynamoDB single-table design, serverless throughout (via a systems integrator).
• BI modernization on QuickSight for a media group; Elasticsearch-backed product search for a retail group.

AI and agentic engineering

• Set the company’s AI direction and led it to the AWS Generative AI Services Competency.
• Spoke on “Promises Agents Can Keep” at the Agentic Coding Meetup Hamburg, covering pinky-promise, our open-source API contract enforcement for Claude Code.
• Took a run at an answering machine on Claude and Amazon Connect for German bureaucratic phone calls.

Identity and authorization

• Built an identity mapping service on Amazon Cognito for a European mobility provider, reconciling customer identities across their platform.
• Cognito/OIDC single sign-on plus a Zanzibar-style permission model (SpiceDB, oso) for a B2B software vendor, alongside compute-heavy C++ Lambda functions.

IoT, embedded and apps

• Device enrollment and fleet provisioning for an autonomous-driving programme: AWS IoT Core and Greengrass, with embedded C/C++ against the AWS SDK on vehicle hardware.
• Customer mobile app and installer web frontend for a home-energy provider (React Native, Expo, Amplify), including the API design, on a CDK backend of Cognito identity pools, DynamoDB, Python Lambdas and AWS IoT.
• React frontend and text-to-speech training pipeline for a global industrial manufacturer, built with GitHub Copilot back when that was new (via a systems integrator).

Modernization

• AI-aided PHP 8 migration of a large content publishing platform, plus RDS setup and content distribution on AWS.
• ML prediction APIs and CloudFormation-to-CDK migrations across customer estates.

Selected writing, cross-posted from the company blog:

• Spec-Driven Development: Everything Old Is New Again
• Building an answering machine with superpowers
• super-eks: Ein EKS-Installer auf CDK-Basis
• AWS-Architekturdiagramme mit PlantUML erstellen
• AWS Lambda mit Java, Gradle und dem CDK
• Nachhaltige und sichere AWS-Umgebungen (with Sönke Rümpler)
• Kubernetes und AWS
• Eine Deploy-Pipeline mit AWS CodePipeline

2010 - 2017 Jimdo GmbH

• Design, implement and roll out HTTPS for 500K user domains using Let’s Encrypt
• Team Lead Platform Engineering
• Migrated infrastructure from use of images to containers (AMI -> Docker).
• Replaced Vagrant developer system with Docker.
• Refactored Jenkins setup using Docker and DSL plugin to be fully versioned.
• Part of SRE team being on call for the platform.
• Planned and executed migration of ~200 physical servers from three different colocations to Amazon AWS.
• Designed and implemented MySQL database migration to Amazon RDS, designed and implemented sharding strategy.
• Introduced new monitoring tool Prometheus to replace Nagios.
• Implemented and designed a search interface for back office components based on Apache Solr.
• Implemented and designed an authentication system for APIs.
• Implemented and designed the APIfication of the whole backend for use with mobile clients using Apache Thrift.
• Implemented and designed an API router to expose legacy components via an API.
• Reimplemented Google’s closure compiler service for faster JavaScript minification.
• Refactored shop component to internationalize tax calculation.
• Replaced monolithic test server with Vagrant developer boxes.
• Introduced a deployment pipeline for continuous deployment.
• Introduced acceptance tests based on Cucumber and Selenium.
• Introduced a CI environment using Jenkins.

2006 - 2010 CoreMedia AG

• Developed social software extensions, among them a backend for moderating user content for a well known German news paper.
• Developed a micro blogging platform called Trillr based on Django.
• Migrated the build system from Ant to Maven (50+ modules).
• Developed a web based CMS editor toolkit based on Spring and JSF.
• Developed GUI installer for the CMS platform.
• Integrated/migrated internal bugtracker to JIRA.

1998 - 2006 Various student jobs

System administration and user support for S24 Direkt, travelchannel.de and CoreMedia.

Skills

• Languages:

  • Bash
  • C/C++
  • Clojure
  • Go
  • Java
  • JavaScript
  • PHP
  • Python
  • Ruby
  • TypeScript
• Open source contributions:
  • aws-cdk (MSK and self-managed Kafka Lambda event sources)
  • riemann (Nagios integration)
  • packer (Puppet master integration)
  • confd (DynamoDB backend)
  • thrift (various compiler patches)
  • prometheus_client_php (co-author and maintainer of the PHP instrumentation library, 281★)
• Tools and concepts:
  • agile development (Scrum, Kanban and whatever works)
  • cloud computing (esp. Amazon AWS)
  • configuration management (Ansible and Puppet)
  • continuous integration (Jenkins et.al.)
  • deployment pipelines
  • complex build systems
  • APIs (authentication, documentation, rate limiting etc.)
  • data driven decisions
  • Debian flavoured linux
  • Docker
  • monitoring (Prometheus and Nagios/Icinga)
  • requirements engineering
  • RPC vs REST
  • software testing
  • user stories
  • team facilitation, retrospective moderation
  • dealing with legacy codebases

Education

1999 - 2007 University of Hamburg, Computer Science, Diploma

Focus on Interactive Media and Virtual Environments. Thesis on “A chair based interface for controlling desktop applications”, part of the ChairIO project.

• Brauer, J. and Beckhaus, S.: Sitzbasierte Steuerung von Desktopapplikationen und eine ergonomische Bewertung. In: Dokumentation des 56. Arbeitswissenschaftlichen Kongresses in Darmstadt, 24.–26.03.2010, GfA-Press, Dortmund. PDF