👨 About

My interest is the area of Requirements Engineering, Product Management, Systems Integration & Software Engineering in customer-centric and service-based industries - I like to solve problems through people, processes and technology with an agile mindset and empathy. I have more than 13 years of experience in developing and managing mission-critical digital products at scale in the hospitality and insurance industry.

I have been educated in a broad range of quantitative and qualitative skills at three European universities in Germany, Sweden, and England. My work or work that I have contributed to has been published in peer-reviewed and recognized journals within their respective fields. Products that I have architected and shipped are used by millions of customers, generating very significant transaction volumes. I am fluent and can work in German, English, and Swedish. In addition, I am more or less fluent in Kotlin, Groovy, Java, Scala, PHP, Typescript, Javascript and a range of SQL dialects. The idea to build things that have a positive impact on the lifes of people like you and me is what drives me at work.

Outside of work, I like to spend my free time with running (I’ve recently gotten into running half marathons), reading sci-fi books and stuff about psychology, cooking, playing guitar and music in general. I tend to - for better or worse - absorb knowledge like a sponge, there is probably nothing I am not interested in or can not get excited about.

💻 Skills & Experience

I consider myself a ‘full-stack software engineer and business analyst with a focus on cloud technologies’. I have a wide range of skills from requirements engineering, software engineering, business analysis and project management methodologies. I grew up with the internet in the 90s and started writing code when I was 12 - the time I got my first Mac with HyperCard. Some years later, I’ve started building dynamic Web sites with cgi before there were frameworks. Now for nostalgic reasons, have an ‘under construction’ gif:

I have learned to dynamically deal with shifting priorities and expectations in highly uncertain environments.

💼 Practice

• Senior IT Solution Architect at About You / SCAYLE (Current). My role is to get a deep understanding of the client’s infrastructure and then provide pragmatic solutions to integrate this infrastructure into SCAYLE. As a solution architect, I am in charge of running technical workshops, providing guidance, mapping out the target architecture, and facilitating decision-making at all levels. I liaise with technical as well as business stakeholders, and internal development teams.
• Product Manager at Uncharted. I worked at Uncharted as a (technical) Product Manager. I was mainly involved in the pre-sales process, where I turned high-level client expectations into innovative prototypes and proof of concepts. Implemented an Embedded Insurance portal for credit card holders across multiple markets in the APAC region. Uncharted is a global insurtech company that is moving insurance distribution, product innovation, and policy administration into the platform economy. Our platform powers digital insurance transactions between global insurance carriers, brokers, and distributors - increasing scale, efficiency, and the flexibility to operate across product lines and insurance markets (Feb. 2021 - Jan. 2022).
• Head of Software Development at hepster.com, where I built a headless cloud-based embedded insurance distribution platform. I helped the business from seed to its Series A by architecting and implementing a cloud-native infrastructure based on Spring Boot & Kotlin, AWS, Docker, Laravel, and Vue.js and coaching the delivery team. I turned high-level ideas and visions into technical product roadmaps and concrete deliverables using methodologies like impact mapping and “Discover to Deliver”. Spearheaded the transition from project-based delivery into product-based thinking. (Oct. 2017 - Jan. 2021).
• Systems Analyst AIDA Cruises’ Digital Unit, where I helped with the integration of Digital Products into legacy systems infrastructures as part of the organization’s Digital Transformation. I was primarily involved in building decision support systems for call centers and the group’s expansion into the Chinese market. I also got to spend some time in Shanghai which was a great experience. (Oct. 2016 - Oct. 2017).
• Business Analyst Reservations & Electronic Channels at AIDA Cruises, where I was responsible for the internet booking platforms and the electronic channels (B2C - B2B) connected to it. I primarily dealed with the integration of legacy reservation systems, requirements engineering and architecting a mission-critical Java stack based on Spring & Hibernate handling high transaction volumes. This included close collaboration with stakeholders in Europe and the United States across the whole product lifecycle (Nov. 2011 - Oct. 2016).
• Project Manager for a business-to-business marketing analysis project for a major cruise line in the DACH travel market.
• Research Assistant for the programme in (International) Cruise Industry Management at the Bremerhaven University of Applied Sciences.
• Internship at the “Touristikverband Rotenburg Wümme e.V.”, where I implemented a county-wide internet reservation system.

🚀 Technology Stack

Current

• Java Ecosystem (Especially the Groovy programming language, Spring Boot, Kotlin, and Scala)
• Amazon Web Services (ECS, EC2, SQS, SNS, RDS, Route53, CloudWatch, Lambda)
• Google Cloud Platform (Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, Artifact Registry, Cloud Armor, Cloud Load Balancing)
• Spring Framework (Spring Boot)
• Payment Processors (Adyen, PayPal)
• JUnit
• Gradle
• Headless Content Management Systems (Prismic, Contentful)
• Laravel
• Git
• PHP
• Confluence
• Jira
• Test Automation with JMeter and Selenium
• IntelliJ IDEA
• RESTful Web Services
• SOAP
• HTML
• CSS
• Javascript

Attic

• Camunda
• Passkit (yes, I have built insurance certificates for your wallet)
• iOS / Cocoa
• Objective-C
• Play! Framework
• PHPUnit
• Python
• XML-RPC (I have worked with some very strange legacy APIs)
• Elixir

🔧 Methodology

Current

• Kanban
• C4
• Model-Based Requirements Engineering
• Agile Requirements Engineering
• User Stories
• User Story Slicing
• Acceptance Criteria

Attic

• Scrum
• Test-Driven Development
• Use Case 2.0
• Product Roadmapping
• Quantitative Statistics

🎓 Research & Other Contributions

My work or work that I have contributed to has been published in peer-reviewed and renowned journals within the respective fields. I have been educated in a broad range of quantitative and qualitative skills at three European universities. I also do side projects and some consulting to scratch own itches, stay on top of current technologies, and give something back to the communities that I owe a lot to.

Teaching

I teach undergraduate courses in Information Systems Management and Information Systems Development at the University of Applied Sciences in Bremerhaven tailored to Cruise Tourism Management students (CTM Website).

Open Source

• easy-rules. I contributed the ability to read MVEL rules from strings using a java.io.Reader to easy-rules, a simple rules engine for Java.
• ferien-api. I built a small service based on Spring Boot, Kotlin, and Jetty that exposes German school holidays via a RESTful API

My aim is to participate more in OSS in the future.

Mentions in the media / Talks

• Press: hepster startet Wallet-Feature für Versicherungsprodukte. hepster startet Wallet-Feature für Versicherungsprodukte. Experten-Report / Versicherungs- und Finanznachrichten https://www.experten.de/2019/02/01/hepster-startet-wallet-feature-fuer-versicherungsprodukte/
• Pitch: Global Insurtech Roadshow 2019 - March 19-20 2019. Global Insurtech Roadshow Frankfurt https://gir19.com/
• Pitch: Plug and Play Insurtech’s Broker•Age - May 9th 2019. A Brokers, Agents & Distribution Conference https://www.evensi.de/insurtech-europe-broker-age-plug-play-munich/293820224

Projects

• canvas to png. I built an application that allows users to extract PNG images from <canvas> elements on Web sites - which is not really possible without knowledge of the Javascript console. The application is built on top of Spring Boot, Kotlin, Jax-RS, and Apache Artemis. Image extraction is done through a headless Chrome browser, which runs in its own container. (https://canvastopng.de)
• webhook.works. I needed an application that can help me to (securely - by default) debug webhooks. So I have built https://webhook.works, a full suite to see incoming webhook requests, see the request payload, and customize the response behaviour through user-provided Javascript snippets. The application is based on Spring Boot, Kotlin, Jax-RS, ActiveMQ and GraalVM to execute polyglot code and build native images. The application is invite-only for now. (https://webhook.works)
• Ferien-Api.de. I built a small service based on Spring Boot, Kotlin, and Jetty that exposes German school holidays via a RESTful API. (https://www.ferien-api.de)

Publications

• Brejla, P. & Gilbert, D. (2012). An Exploratory Use of Web Content Analysis to Understand Cruise Tourism Services. International Journal of Tourism Research. 16(2):157-168. (Download / Buy)
• Papathanassis, A. & Brejla, P. (2012). Tourism Extranet Acceptance in the Cruise Distribution Chain: The Role of Content, Usability, and Appearance. Journal of Information Technology & Tourism. 13(2): 105-117. (Download / Buy)
• Papathanassis, A., Matuszewski, I. & Brejla, P. (2011). The ‘Cruise Ship Railing Dance’: Conducting academic research in the cruise domain. In Cruise Tourism and Society A Socio-economic Perspective. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. (Download / Buy)
• Master Thesis: Looting the Buffet and Prowling around the Pool - Exploring the Co-Created Cruise Vacation. A Web Content Mining Approach. - Linköping University, Sweden. Supervisor: David Gilbert, PhD (University of Surrey, England).
• Bachelor Thesis: Modelling Travel Agency Extranet Acceptance: The Role of Usability, Content and Appearance. - Bremerhaven University of Applied Sciences, Germany. Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Alexis Papathanassis.

Contact / Imprint

You may contact me via e-mail under paul(at)paulbrejla(dot)com or via social media, which I prefer.

Paul Brejla
Schellerdamm 9
21079 Hamburg