avatar

Reza Jelveh
Code Wizard

About

Reza is an expert who has worked as a CTO for startups and a German government institution with a billion-dollar revenue that needed restructuring. Since dismantling his first VCR 30+ years ago, he has become a deep generalist exploring new topics to recognize patterns across domains and the science behind them. Reza has built meaningful, innovative solutions in integrated circuit testing, real-time seismic activity detection and mitigation, healthcare, surgery procedures and materials, AI, security, and data center construction.

Work Experience

SoftSage Solutions
2020 – Present
CTO
Working hands-on with pre-seed, seed and Series A companies including one Fortune 500 automotive leader, to unstuck struggling Startups quickly turn around their DevOps, MLOps and engineering teams when necessary, as hands-on CTO as a Service and DevSecOps expert. Clients included AI/ML/NLP startups as well as the autonomous vehicle division at Caterpillar.
Highlights
  • Serverless and DevOps migratons to CloudNative solutions for potential white labelling and fast reproducible infrastructure builds as well as potential decoupling of high Cloud costs
  • Full CI migration including CloudNative GitOps implementation of per branch git-flow solutions with 100x code reduction and 20x CI performance improvements to support the engineering team growth
  • Redesign of ML pipeline and subsequent management and growth of MLOps teams
  • CTO as a service for seed funded startup to migrate smoothly from PoC upwork team and codebase to real high turnaround engineering team with production grade code with proper persistency guarantees for clients
  • Migration to multi cluster, multi-tenant secure infrastructure for early stage startup to support growth to critical infrastructure for enterprise clients
  • Reverse engineering of proprietary data formats in smart manufacturing environments to support AI platform data ingestion
  • [object Object]
Rio Tinto
Montreal / Mongolia
2019 – 2020
Software and System Architect, Team Lead - Hardware, Software, Edge compute, Cloud, and leadership and product release
One of the most ambitious mining projects in the world in partnership with the second-largest mining corporation of the world. This project was aimed to massively increase safety and productivity.
Highlights
  • Built and led team of 8 people with seismologist, ML engineers, frontend and backend devs across 5 countries
  • Architected a scalable containerized solution for a seismic analytics platform for real-time sensor analysis
  • Introduced a Django-based REST API for the unified access of processed data. Built a real-time web integration in Django
  • Enhanced a major performance and architectural review and rewrites of all components involved. Rewrote and architected various pieces of Python code into a releasable versionable library
  • Reverse-engineered a legacy database and storage systems for integration in a Kafka streaming re-architecture, significantly reducing the latency in the data access. I built a Kafka-streaming solution for ingesting legacy data in Kotlin
  • Developed a Go connector to extract legacy data for stream processing in Kafka
  • Implemented near real-time processing of seismic events. Also, I matched requirements with potential streaming solutions Flink, Pachyderm, Argo, Airflow, NiFi, Spark, and Flink to provide the best solution to the client
  • Rearchitected the application to reduce the amount of data passed around in messages and removed and replaced Kafka dependency for normal messaging to Kafka streams processing where it was necessary
  • Azure, AKS, Terraform, Rancher, AKS, Dell VxRail, TimescaleDB, postgresql, django, TensorFlow, golang, Java, Kafka, redis, confluent, Edge Compute, Ceph, Rook-Ceph, MetalLB, MLOps, Kubeflow, Multi-national team building, Operators, deep-learning
2018 – 2019
DevOps Engineer
Highlights
  • Containerized the various components written by scientists into services that can be built and ran equally on all environments
  • Profiled and rewrote major parts of the application, turning them into a Python library, and added Python packaging and testing infrastructure with corresponding build pipelines
  • Created Gitlab CI pipelines and migrated everyone to work in a reproducible manner
  • Designed and implemented a scalable on-premise Kubernetes-based cluster with deployment in a copper mine. It mirrored the deployment on the cloud for developers without the need for access to the internal corporate processes
  • Azure, Kubernetes, Gitlab CI, Kubespray, AKS
Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians
Hamburg, Germany
2016 – 2018
CTO - Merging of leadership, cloud, infrastructure, healthcare and security
Kassenärztliche Vereinigung is the Associations of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians. Processing the entire medical history of millions of citizens and processing billions in transactions each month, paying out doctors and billing the various medical insurances, as well influencing federal medical policy.
Highlights
  • Managed a dozen contracting companies, planned, audited and coordinated the wiring, data center, wireless, and security in the €40M construction of the new HQ (Building services engineering)
  • Responsible for the migration and modernization of one of the most critical pars of German healthcare industry
  • Signed off on €5M+ in budget for infrastructure and engineering strategy
  • Managed 20 people across emergency projects spanning IT, Accounting, Legal and Engineering, with millions of Euros at stake related to healthcare regulation
  • Directed the Director of Operations, Engineering and Data Sciences
  • Saved 10M by discovering and fundamental design issues in the construction project of the new headquarters including but not limited to next-gen wiring and physical access control
  • Leveraged agile project management to reimagine software development and IT lifecycles
  • Introduced IaC to the IT Ops department, Angular and Ruby on Rails as standard frameworks for all new software engineering projects including training and mentorship and introduced security incident postmortems.
  • Audited the construction security; analyzed ransomware
  • Improved network segmentation as mitigation strategy for ransomware threats with the IT Ops team
  • Security, BSE, Medical policy, IaC, Budgeting, Security
Eblotter
London, UK
2015 – 2016
CoFounder - CTO
Highlights
  • Conceptualized, designed, developed, and deployed a price discovery/agreement platform for ETF brokers currently used by one of the biggest securities brokerage firms in the world
  • Sold to brokerage firm
  • React, Ruby on Rails, Ansible, capistrano
SauceLabs LLC
San Francisco, US
December 2014 – December 2016
Platform Engineer - Expansion of Cloud performance
SauceLabs served thousands of concurrent virtual machines with a peak of 1 million a day by the time I was done, for testing web and mobile applications to customers such as Yahoo! and Salesforce.
Highlights
  • Improved SauceLabs cloud performance up to 38% and Cloud Boot times over 17%
  • Created automated bootloader rewrite solutions to automatically migrate VMWare ESXI deployments to managed KVM servers without human interaction
  • Extended SauceLabs virtualization hypervisor KVM technology to support Mac OS X 10.9+ Extended tianocore OVMF for 10.10 and 10.11 support
  • Automated development environments for new hires
  • Lead effort to introduce SR-IOV for virtualization infrastructure and boost network performance
  • IDA Pro, HexRays, UEFI, Tianocore, Ansible, Linux Kernel (Sata stack), DPDK, NUMA, pstates, VMWare, SaaS
Flyvictor Ltd
London, UK
2014 – 2014
Web Development Team Lead - Leadership growth and more automation
Flyvictor is one of the largest web platform for private charter flight bookings.
Highlights
  • Led a 7 people team of web developers to move the web platform to the next-gen interactive user experience
  • Increased conversion rates for new visits by 29%
  • Oversaw launch process, massively increasing turnaround on first-time private jet charter customers
  • Ansible, node.js
Center for Business and Information Technologies (CBIT) - University of Louisiana
Louisiana, USA
2012 – 2013
Software Engineer - Healthcare and mission critical applications & deeping distributed systems knowledge, early Cloud
CBIT creates emergency response solutions for the State of Louisiana and is the biggest contractor for improving the Department of Health & Hospitals (DHH) technical infrastructure.
Highlights
  • Led the architectural design for the Virtual Business Emergency Operating Center (VBEOC) connecting state and business emergency response measures in a single web platform
  • Did a vulnerability audit for the Department of Homeland Security(DHH)on an architectural and security assessment for distributed emergency response architecture
  • Designed and implemented a RESTful API for the first federal Medicaid API
  • Wrote special tooling to allow normal developers to modify data structures in the Dynamics CRM. The Department of Health of Louisiana unfortunately chose Dynamics CRM as an EHR
  • Evaluated the use of AWS GovCloud for Medicaid solutions
  • WCF, Basho Riak, Nancy, Distributed Systems, Microservices, Dynamics CRM, HIPAA, Medicaid, SaaS, XMPP, AWS GovCloud
Protonet
Hamburg, Germany
2009 – 2010
CoFounder - First attempts at founding my own Startup
Protonet is now the most popular German personal cloud solution. Protonet later raised 3 million euros in a record crowdsourcing campaign of 45 minutes.
Highlights
  • Deployed the initial provisioning stack for Protonet hardware using Debian
  • Implemented the first version of the wireless access point stack
  • Integrated 3 new hardware types with Protonet cloud OS based on EFI firmware requirements, and conducted value analysis for next-gen Protonet products
Talkyoo
Hamburg, Germany
2009 – 2012
Principal Software Architect - Further growth in web architecture
talkyoo is one of Germany's top online conferencing platforms. Contrary to most other providers talkyoo provided high quality physical lines as opposed to just VoIP.
Highlights
  • Employee number 2
  • Collaborated with CEO and lead designer to conduct lean user experience testing to develop sustainable business model. Grew to cash-flow positive from ground zero
  • Built the original transition to Rails 2 and integrated the payment infrastructure, working closely with the CTO, CEO, and lead designer on commercializing the product and A/B testing migration of the existing free customers
  • Spearheaded development of talkyoo's web platform
  • Spearheaded deployment of infrastructure with Chef
  • Distributed deployment automation
  • Ruby on Rails, PCI-DSS, Growth Hacking, Chef, IaC, AB testing, MySQL, Replication, Distributed systems, capistrano, SaaS
TalentRun GmbH
Hamburg, Germany
2008 – 2009
Software Architect - Growth to web architecture
TalentRun was Germany's biggest online Karaoke and one of the biggest streaming platforms.
Highlights
  • Scaled the application over 10x to beyond hundred of thousand email campaigns and multiple million unique page impressions a day
  • Coordinated with the CTO and Percona (the lead provider of MySQL solutions) to scale the database system to support millions of video recording viewings
  • 100x performance improvements to improve user conversions and SEO
  • Migrate images to sprites to improve load times
  • Detailed Apache tuning for web performance
  • Profiling of PHP app to reduce ORM overhead and rewrite of slow queries with custom ORM
  • Introduction of memcache for query and page caching
  • A/V encoding, Streaming, PHP, Zend, C, MySQL
Acculogic
Hamburg, Germany
2007 – 2008
Junior Hardware Engineer - Early paid work
Acculogic is an industry-leading company building hardware for automated integrated circuit design. Intel and Airbus are amongst Acculogics customers. My main work was based on the flying prober product line.
Highlights
  • Devised implementation strategy to modernize Acculogic's code versioning and customer feedback system.
  • Partnered with hardware engineers to implement proof of concepts for two new integrated testing methodologies called NetScan greatly improving testing speed
  • Used a protocol analyzer to show that the design for the new ISA to PCI controller board migration was incorrect and provided an assessment of alternative based on OpenSource PCI VHDL Designs
  • Wrote device driver for Ruch USB servo motor for the flying prober because the original had a race condition in the initialization
  • C, C++, VHDL

Awards

  • November 2012

    SuperBowl Commitee

    Winner - Official Super Bowl Hackathon

    Built a parking finder app for the SuperBowl event in New Orleans.

  • November 2012

    CBIT

    Winner Cajun Code Fest

    Created a Symptom Tracker(Symptone) that tracks symptoms by allowing selecting the anatomical region of the body with an intensity and then allows playing music to alleviate basic mental stress related to the symptoms.

  • November 2011

    CBIT

    Winner Cajun Code Fest

    Created a gamified health tracker addressing the problem that Louisiana is the second most obese state of the United States.

Projects

    Various OSS | CloudNative Contributor
    Highlights
    • Kubernetes: Fission, Rook-Ceph, ArgoCD, FluxCD
    • librdkafka
    Added Nuvoton | Ducky Support to QMK | ChibiOS
    Highlights
    • QMK is an embedded keyboard distribution that runs on ChibiOS—an RTOS. I added support for a keyboard I bought and used for a while.
    • The keyboard uses a Nuvoton NUC123 SoC. I first mainlined support for the Nuvoton platform to ChibiOS and then mainlined the keyboard support to QMK
    • RTOS, C
    Go FreeNAS API Client
    Highlights
    • Wrote a Go FreeNAS API client for use with the Terraform provider that I created
    • golang
    FreeNAS Terraform Provider
    Highlights
    • Created a Terraform FreeNAS provider to manage the NAS from Terraform, making it much nicer and easier to use in production environments
    • golang
    openWNS
    Highlights
    • Implemented a layer 2 behavior for Inmarsat satellites based on data sheets, private docs and press releases
    • This allowed simulating communication for FDR (Flight Data Recording) P2P transfers in Inmarsat zones to estimate the optimal data transfer between planes
    • Ported the entire codebase to work crossplatform
    • Migrated it from gcc to support clang
    • Wrote custom patches for stock Clang to compile on macOS
    • C++
    tianocore UEFI
    Highlights
    • Added several protocols and fixes to the open-source UEFI bootloader and Qemu to unmodified macOS to boot in Qemu after analyzing Apples bootloader binaries
    • Added an implementation of an HFS+ filesystem driver to EDKII
    • Reverse engineering macOS boot stages to analyze missing protocols in the tianocore EFI implementation
    • C, IDA
    Linux Kernel
    Highlights
    • Fixed initialization of SATA devices
    • C
    nginx
    Highlights
    • Wrote the first nginx WebSocket implementation based on draft 76 of WebSocket specification
    • C, Networking, IETF
    Universal Ctags
    Highlights
    • Forked exuberant Ctags and moved it to a new organization with the amazing work of Masatake Yamato
    • All forks of CTags were integrated into this one, and it became the de facto standard for all ctags implementations
    Anarchy Online
    Highlights
    • Fixed a BigEndian crypto issue in the authentication handshake
    • Packet analysis and reverse engineering of the Anarchy Online protocol
    • Net
    • Cryptography, Cocoa, Objective-C, C, Wireshark
    mplayer/ffmpeg
    Highlights
    • Executed the AltiVec CPU optimizations in the FFmpeg Swscaler
    • Implemented S3 savage graphics VIDIX driver
    • Implemented an NSV demuxer
    • Added seeking in Real files without an index to allow seeking in RTMP streams
    • Created the first Musepack decoding patch
    • C, Power ISA assembly, A/V Encoding, Streaming
    Reverse engineering during highschool
    Highlights
    • Migrated a chiptunes player into a library to use for 8K binaries from Atari
    • Migrated a C64 SIDPlayer to a lightweight Win32 libray
    • Wrote an LR Parser for a pet calculator that was able to do high number arithmetics for crypto applications
    • Learned programming by reverse engineering FlexLM, HASP, Hardlock, and other licensing servers
    • x86 assembly, C, C++, Security, IDA Pro, Reverse Engineering, FlexLM, HASP, Hardlock, Sentinel, Parsers, Cryptography

Contact

San Francisco, CA
jobs@jelveh.me
github
fishman

Education

  • 2013 2014

    Hamburg University of Technology

    Diplom/Masters of Engineering, Simulative Evaluation of Inmarsat-4 for Continuous Flight Data Transmission

    Computer Engineering / Communication Networks & Algorithms and Architecture

  • 2002 2006

    Hamburg University of Technology

    Diplom, Performance Analysis of Wireless Mesh Networks

    Computer Engineering (unfinished)

Skills

Frontend Senior
HTML / JSX Javascript / Typescript React / Next Redux / Apollo
Backend Strong
Node Ruby Python Postgres Kafka ClickHouse MySQL Redis Java Kotlin
RE Strong
IDA Pro Android Dex
Devops Strong
AWS GCloud Heroku Azure Kubernetes Ceph Caching
Devops Strong
AWS GCloud Heroku Azure Kubernetes Ceph Caching
Programming Moderate
Go Lua
Programming Functional
C C++ Rust
Compliance Strong
PCI-DSS ISO-27001 HIPAA
Databases and Distributed Systems Competent
Riak Cassandra DynamoDB ClickHouse ElasticSearch Solr MySQL postgreSQL MongoDB Couchbase
Streaming Strong
RabbitMQ Kafka Redis Streams Azure Stream Analytics Amazon Kinesis
Streaming Moderate
Pachyderm Airflow Argo Spark MLflow Kubeflow

Publications

Learning from Building an Earthquake Detection System
Mozilla Foundation Taiwan
09 September 2020
https://fr-fr.facebook.com/events/%E6%91%A9%E8%8C%B2%E5%B7%A5%E5%AF%AE-mozilla-community-space-taipei/coscup-ai-track-%E5%88%86%E4%BA%AB%E6%9C%83/1275586776120799/

A more detailed Chinese language talk on the details.

Machine Learning in Mining/Seismology
CosCup OpenSource Conference Taiwan / AI Track
02 August 2020
https://coscup.org/2020/zh-TW/agenda/EUQBC3

Describing how to build a hypbrid cloud earthquake detection system processing 1TB of data a day in real-time to save lives with limited internet connectivity in Chinese.

Languages

  • EnglishNative speaker
  • GermanNative speaker
  • FrenchNative speaker
  • FarsiNative speaker
  • MandarinConversational
  • JapaneseBasic

Interests

Open Source
Reverse Engineering
Languages
Capoeira
Piano
Geopolitics / History