Upon my return to Wallester, I took on the management of a large cross-functional organization comprising 50+ FTEs, including backend, frontend, mobile, infrastructure, and QA engineers.My responsibilities encompass establishing and driving the long-term vision and strategy for the IT department, planning budgets, and effectively allocating engineering resources. I focus on developing both people managers and individual contributors by organizing and prioritizing learning activities, leading the recruitment process, and ensuring the IT department grows in capability and size according to organizational needs. Additionally, I oversee the reliability, performance, and scalability of the Card Issuing Platform, ensuring all systems, processes, and practices comply with necessary regulations and security requirements (Estonian Financial Supervision and Resolution Authority regulations, PCI-DSS regulations, etc.).

I led a few teams responsible for developing a platform to execute automated component and multi-party end-to-end tests across various platforms and devices. This platform connected thousands of virtual devices and over a thousand physical devices across two labs in Tallinn and Redmond, and was extensively used by Microsoft Teams, Skype, Azure Communication Services, and others. Under my leadership, the platform scaled tenfold in the number of test executions per month.My role encompassed: people management (including career development), product development (including product strategy, customer relations, and cross-team collaboration), project management (including planning, estimations, and SCRUM), software engineering (including software architecture, pull request reviews, and software development), software maintenance (including 24/7 on-call support and incident management). Additionally, I participated in numerous local and pan-European hiring events, helping to recruit dozens of software engineers for the Microsoft Development Center in Estonia.We utilized Python and .NET stacks, deploying everything on Azure (App Services, Functions, Cosmos DB, Cache for Redis, Service Bus, AAD, Key Vault, DevTest Labs, etc.).

Wallester is a FinTech company that simplifies complex card payment solutions, making them easily accessible to merchants and financial institutions.As a key member from the very beginning, I designed a highly scalable and reliable financial platform for issuing VISA cards. This included payment card issuing, card lifecycle management, processing of authorizations (ISO8583), clearing, settlement, 3D Secure, VTS, and more. I introduced a microservice architecture and oversaw its development from scratch. My role also involved collaborating with external partners Wallester integrates with and acting as a Product Owner.I led the hiring process, participated in all technical interviews, and was actively involved in platform development, establishing the initial architecture, reviewing feature designs, conducting code reviews, and handling acceptance processes. I managed all external integrations with Personalization Centers, Processors, 3D Secure providers, and Fraud Management providers, overseeing selection processes, relationship management, and documentation (BRD and FRD). Additionally, I worked with B2B customers to help them understand integration flows, led a product team, and contributed to product development and strategy.Technically, the platform was a distributed cloud-based system (Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure) using Go language, Protocol Buffers, gRPC, PostgreSQL, Redis, JSON REST API, Swagger, Docker, Kubernetes, and more.

Riverty, formerly known as AfterPay, is a leading European financial institution and buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) provider, equipping merchants with flexible payment options across Europe.I was hired as a Senior Software Developer for the AfterPay project, which had a distributed development team across Norway, Sweden, and Estonia. I worked on developing a JSON REST API and backend to support payment functionality. Additionally, I led an integration project in the role of Development Manager/Architect, integrating the AfterPay platform with a white-label client. My responsibilities included analyzing requirements, planning development tasks and team assignments, and ensuring overall project delivery.In another project, I served as the Development Manager where I bridged the gap between the German business team and the Estonian development team. I managed two development teams (external with 5 vendors and internal with 2 FTEs), coordinated cross-team communication, and oversaw project delivery.During my tenure at Riverty, I utilized the .NET stack, MSSQL Server, RabbitMQ and leveraged Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build a highly available system with failover support.I also led the hiring process, conducting numerous technical interviews.

After a year, when Nordiska established a new IT department in Tallinn (Estonia), I was hired as a permanent employee and relocated back to Tallinn. In addition to my previous tasks, I initiated the migration of the monolithic application to a service-oriented architecture and its deployment to the cloud using Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Nordiska is a leading provider of convenient everyday financial services and a pioneer in mobile lending for consumers in Nordic countries.I worked in the Nordiska IT department at the Stockholm (Sweden) office as a Senior .NET Consultant. During my tenure, I developed the backend for a web-based short and mid-term loan management system, handling tasks such as payment placement, integration with a card issuer to support VISA credit cards, integration with credit information companies, scoring, and more, all using the .NET stack with MSSQL Server.

Helmes is an international software house headquartered in Tallinn, with clients across all of Europe. I was hired as a .NET consultant for one of Helmes clients in financial sector.

A year later, I was promoted to the Development Manager position, leading a team of 5 FTEs. We developed a solution for running different tasks remotely on managed IT devices, involving a .NET Web Application on the server side and C++ code on the client side. My role encompassed leading and supervising the software development team, project planning, people management, risk analysis, and mitigation. I was also involved in architectural decisions and their implementation, as well as performing security analysis of the components developed by my team, including OWASP and data flow/threat analysis.

After two years, I was promoted to Principal Software Engineer and joined the ITMS Core team, the primary team responsible for developing the ITMS platform. While continuing my previous responsibilities, I also mentored and coached new team members, supervised other developers, and participated in architectural decisions.

Symantec Estonia, a fully owned subsidiary of Symantec Corp. (NASDAQ: SYMC), was responsible for developing the IT Management Suite (ITMS), a comprehensive platform for managing various IT assets in large organizations.I began my journey at Symantec Estonia as a Senior Software Engineer, where I developed both Windows and Web applications using .NET stack with MSSQL Server.

Uptime is a European IT company specializing in Software Development, SharePoint Solutions and ICT Maintenance Services.I had a SharePoint project for one client from financial sector were I implemented different kinds of web parts and features for WSS and Microsoft SharePoint 2007 using ASP.NET, C#, MSSQL as a database.

In Fujitsu's Estonian branch I continued close cooperation with the Symbian company. I was moved to new .NET project and developed internal tools using C# language and MSSQL database.I technically led a distributed team of engineers (8 FTEs), identified new development tasks, managed their execution and was fully responsible for team deliverables.

Symbian was a mobile operating system (OS) and computing platform designed for smartphones.I was sent as a contractor to their London office (UK) for half a year, where I tested Symbian's new memory management technology - Demand Paging. I wrote automated tests in Symbian C++ language in different areas (Networking - HTTP, FTP; Connectivity - SMS, Calling, Multimedia - Sound, Images; etc).

Maxima is a Lithuanian retail chain operating in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland and Bulgaria and it is the largest Lithuanian capital company and the largest employer in the Baltic states.I was the first and the only developer in the IT department those days. I moved the work time management process from Excel files to a Web application, which I designed and developed from scratch. The system was implemented in .NET Framework using ASP.NET and C#, database was MS SQL Server. To design the system, which corresponded to the needs of different departments (personal, accounting and shops) I used Agile methodology, constantly communicating with their representatives and showing them demos at the end of each development iteration.

While studying at university I was self-employed and developed different projects mostly in PHP and MySQL. The largest system I made was a large scale system to manage cross counties orders of car tires and their manufacturing processes. The system was designed and developed by me from scratch starting from client communication (gathering requirements) to implementation and successful deployment to client's environment.