# Marco Helmich

> Software Engineering Swiss Army Knife.
I’m focusing on distributed systems, how to store data, and what to do with it.

Location: San Francisco, California, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/marcohelmich

I write software to help solve hard problems. And I hope that in the end me solving hard problems makes users happy.

Areas of interest include: how to collect and organize data (distributed systems, databases, data streaming) and how to put this data to good use (data science, machine learning).

## Work Experience
### Software Engineer @ Skyflow
Jan 2020 – Present

### Software Engineer @ Newfront Insurance
Jan 2019 – Jan 2020 | San Francisco Bay Area
Start-up life: Writing functional React components, converting JS -> TS in the backend, developing graphql APIs, spec'ing out a new authentication infrastructure, delivering features. You name it, I did it.

### Software Engineer @ Salesforce
Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area
Building a data store that is globally distributed (as in all over the world). The store needs to be up all the time (as it's powering features like login), consistent enough (can't create the same username twice concurrently), but still fast enough (to support use cases such as user login).

This store bases on Etcd's excellent raft library written in Go. It's designed to run on AWS all around the world in stateless docker containers. Co-owning all aspects of this project such as design, development, deployment, you name it.

Side gig: Writing a globally distributed Kafka based on the same technology.

### Software Engineer @ Lending Club
Jan 2016 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco Bay Area
Built bullet-proof document storage for documents. Storing legal documents is at the core of banking. I was part of a team of two building and managing a store that never loses data ... ever. But still is fast enough to handle incoming traffic.

Developed parts of Lending Club's authentication service powering the login functionality - chiefly the addition of anomaly detection for authentication attempts. This project involved tracking authentication attempts to generate profiles and verifying new authentication attempts against these profiles to find deviations.

Owned all aspects of these services: Deployment on AWS, testing and deployment pipelines using Jenkins, monitoring and response, development and design, and integration into the rest of Lending Clubs service landscape.

### Software Engineer @ AppDynamics
Jan 2015 – Jan 2016 | San Francisco Bay Area
Built microservices that derive insight out of massive amounts of raw data (such as dashboards, alerts, etc.). These services are racing through gigabytes of data every minute to notify you about broken services before your customers realize.

Contributed to all aspects of AppDynamics' microservice landscape: deployment infrastructure automation on AWS using Docker, release pipelines using Jenkins, data storage (MySQL, HBase), API (Java, Dropwizard), integration with other services, customer cases.

### Software Engineer @ Salesforce.com
Jan 2011 – Jan 2015 | San Francisco
Developed infrastructure to linearly(-ish) scale read traffic.
Helped on-boarding Salesforce's biggest customers by building backend components to remove scalability bottlenecks.
Worked on Salesforce's asynchronous processing framework crunching north of a billion transactions a day.

### Performance Engineer @ Salesforce.com
Jan 2010 – Jan 2011

### Research Assistant @ Hasso-Plattner-Institute
Jan 2009 – Jan 2009
- contribution to SaaS partner development environment
- extension of Visual Studio capabilities and integration with SAP backend infrastructure

### Master Thesis Student @ SAP AG
Jan 2008 – Jan 2009
- Master Thesis project on customization of Software-as-a-Service applications
- implementation of a model-driven infrastructure using Ruby on Rails in a multi-tenant environment

### Project Student @ Hasso-Plattner-Institute
Jan 2008 – Jan 2008
- design and execution of database performance tests with various database systems at Professor Plattner's department
- development of a framework for half-automatic generation and execution of database performance tests

### Intern @ SAP Labs Palo Alto
Jan 2007 – Jan 2008
- prototypical development of search related projects using Adobe Flex, Java, and Java's Mobile Framework
- setup of a database high-availability scenario on Amazon’s EC2


## Education
### MS in Software Systems Engineering
Hasso-Plattner-Institute

### BS in Software Systems Engineering
Hasso-Plattner-Institute


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/marcohelmich
- GitHub: http://eworld.github.com/

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Source: https://flows.cv/marcohelmich
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/marcohelmich/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-10