novemberborn.net

Work

I’m an engineering leader with a strong technical background, who values team collaboration and supporting individual growth. I excel at navigating difficult technological and business trade-offs in medium-sized teams.

Presently I’m looking to build products that enable SMEs to thrive. I can provide most value to a small team that’s looking to grow, or a medium-sized team that’s looking to improve.

If that’s you, and you’re focused on making your own business thrive in tandem, then get in touch.

Technologies

Technologies I’ve worked with most recently, either directly or via my teams, are:

  • Node.js & TypeScript
  • Golang
  • Mobile app development (predominantly React Native, with some Swift & Kotlin)
  • Google Cloud (BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Firestore, IAM, Kubernetes, Pub/Sub)
  • GitOps with Argo CD & Config Connector to manage deployments and environments
  • Observability & monitoring through Honeycomb.io and Datadog

Past Involvements

An overview of the major products I’ve worked on in the past fifteen-odd years. In between I’ve done some consulting and open source work.

Token.com

Token.com is a mass-market consumer crypto platform summarized as “TikTok for Tokens.”

It was spun out of Monolith, with development starting in early 2021. The product was launched in Brazil, first with a yield-generating token and then pivoting to a custodial token trading platform, before adding social features like posts and videos most easily summarized as “TikTok for Tokens.”

I was promoted to Head of Engineering in March 2021 and VP of Engineering in December 2022. After six-plus years with both Token.com and Monolith it became time for a different challenge and I left in October 2024.

Accomplishments within engineering:

  • Grew the team from 10 to 26, with an average tenure over two years and a dozen engineers earning promotions
  • Created a collaborative and respectful environment with engineers learning from and helping each other
  • Helped engineers navigate ambiguity and make appropriate risk trade-offs
  • Supported the team in responding to incidents and driving post-incident improvements
  • Set the bar in terms of code quality
  • Managed the vulnerability disclosure program
  • Risk-management through utilitizing third-party security tools and a program of training in secure code practices

Beyond day-to-day engineering management, responsibilites across the company included:

  • Maintaining best practices for InfoSec & SaaS tools
  • Working with the Compliance team on policies and supporting their development of internal tooling
  • Managing Apple App Store and Google Play Store accounts and getting updates past review

Monolith

Launched early 2019, Monolith was a smart contract-based mobile wallet with a Visa debit card. It ran until October 2024, claiming a $113 million spent by 35,000 European customers.

I was brought on as a contractor in February 2018 by their CTO, whom I’d work with previously at State, to help with their iOS and backend development.

Aligned with a long-term vision of disintermediating financial institutions and an earnest approach to the industry, I joined as Principal Product Engineer in 2019.

My technical deliverables included:

  • BIP32 and transaction signing implementation in iOS, with the resulting key protected by the Secure Enclave
  • End-to-end authentication & authorization system using the customer’s private key and an one-time password delivered to their phone or email
  • A transaction-signing solution resistant to certain network and supply-chain attacks
  • Strong Customer Authentication per PSD2 protecting access to card balances, transaction history and for authorization of online card payments
  • KYC integrations for multiple products, joining up the mobile apps, identity & sanctions checks, address verification and on-chain monitoring
  • API, webhook and SFTP integrations with the card program manager as well as PCI/DSS compliance
  • A GraphQL interface serving the various backend services to the mobile apps
  • Tooling around gRPC, type generation, process lifecycle management, tracing and testing

State

State was an attempt to build a social network that connected people through their opinions. Founded by Alex & Mark Asseily, it lost out against products like Twitter and arguably missed the rise of the iPhone and subsequent industry shifts.

I joined the initial small team in late 2008 and stayed on through 2015, growing to be one of the lead engineers and taking charge of the frontend architecture as well as making significant backend contributions.

Proud achievements (given the technology available at the time) include:

  • Early adoption of Node.js
  • Development of an internal framework to (server-side) render reactive pages (in 2011!)
  • An API gateway powering the website & mobile apps
  • An OAuth implementation including social sign-on, across web and mobile
  • Push notification delivery

Consulting

I’ve done consulting work for SitePen on Dojo 2 and Digital Catapult on blockchain projects.

Minutiæ

I’m a dual Dutch and British citizen. I hold a Bachelor’s degree from University of Twente. I’m fluent in Dutch and English and fairly decent at comprehending German. I’m resident in the Netherlands.