Jean-Pierre Bergamin

Head of Software Development Marketplaces at comparis.ch

Jean-Pierre Bergamin

Management Summary

I lead 15 engineers across four cross-functional teams at comparis.ch, responsible for its real estate and car marketplaces and other comparison services. Previously, I worked on and led development at local.ch. Both platforms serve millions of users.

LocationZurich, Switzerland
E-Mailjames@ractive.ch
Stackoverflowstackoverflow.com/users/285288
Githubgithub.com/ractive
Websiteractive.ch
Location
Zurich, Switzerland
Website
ractive.ch

Leadership & Strategy

  • Leading and growing engineering teams by hiring directly, onboarding, mentoring, and creating an environment where developers take ownership
  • Driving the adoption of AI across engineering and product teams, rethinking development processes, roles and responsibilities
  • Working with product teams, business stakeholders and upper management to align with the technology roadmap and ensure a tech stack that reliably backs two of the biggest platforms with millions of users in Switzerland
  • Strong believer in DevOps: first as a developer, appreciating the freedom and ownership it brings, and now as a leader, fostering responsibility and end-to-end ownership within teams

Technical Depth

  • Masters in electrical engineering (Elektrotechnik und Informationstechnologie) ETH Zürich (dipl. El.-Ing. ETH)
  • 20+ years in software engineering, from years of hands-on development to leading cross-functional teams and driving company-wide technology initiatives
  • Solution architect with strong technical background, designing and delivering cloud-native, microservice-based platforms
  • Cloud migrations: hands-on as a software developer moving applications to Kubernetes on GCP, and now as a Solution Architect driving the move to Kubernetes on Azure
  • Transitioning from monolithic architectures to microservices, first as a developer and today as a Solution Architect leading our modernization efforts
  • Hands-on with the modern tech stack and still close to (and at times even in) the code, focusing recently on Next.js, React, TypeScript, Kubernetes and CI/CD

Professional Career

comparis.ch (since April 2024)

Head of Software Development Marketplaces

  • Leading a dev organization with 15 local and remote engineers across 4 cross-functional teams, responsible for Switzerland’s leading real estate and car marketplaces with several million monthly visitors, plus many other comparison services on comparis.ch
  • Guiding the engineering teams in adopting agentic coding, introducing an AI-first development process and defining clear guardrails
  • Core technologies in use: .NET, Next.js, React, TypeScript, MSSQL, Azure, Kubernetes, Argo CD, Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, OpenTelemetry
  • Intensive hiring efforts to replace 5 developers from a nearshoring partner with directly hired engineers via remote.com (EOR/COR), strengthening team culture and building a stronger sense of belonging together
  • Acting as a Solution Architect, coordinating architectural efforts within the teams, across teams and together with the other departments
  • Designed and built a B2B platform from scratch with a cloud-native architecture based on Kubernetes and microservices
  • Driving company-wide efforts to steadily reduce tech debt and replace legacy systems with modern, microservice-based solutions (strangling the monolith)
  • Advocated for the introduction of a fully automated, Kubernetes-based infrastructure (IaC, GitOps) reducing deployment times and enabling more frequent releases
  • Evolving the teams into a DevOps organization with stronger ownership and responsibility
  • Working with POs, PMs, and upper management (CEO) to design technical solutions that meet business goals and align with the technology roadmap

local.ch/localsearch (September 2013 – March 2024)

Team Leader local.ch engineering (since April 2019)

Team Leader local.ch engineering (April 2019 – March 2024)

  • Took over the line management role for the team developing local.ch
  • Leading two near-shoring teams in Belgrade plus a team in Zurich
  • Led the relaunch of the new local.ch platform (several million monthly visitors), built from scratch

Mentor in the local.ch engineering team (from March 2017)

Mentor in the local.ch engineering team (March 2017 – April 2019)

  • Supporting and defining the hiring process of new engineers and conducting interviews
  • Onboarding of new engineers
  • Organizing hackdays and hack-a-thons
  • Doing regular one-on-ones with the team members
  • Defined an engineering career plan
  • Creating an engineering company handbook

Senior Java (Spring) Developer Backend

Senior Java (Spring) Developer Backend (September 2013 – February 2017)

  • Migrated our backend services to the Google Cloud
  • Set up automated build and deployment pipelines for our backend apps in bamboo
  • Dockerized our backend services to run on Kubernetes
  • Development of our own identity provider (OAuth IdP)
  • Main technologies used: Java, Spring MVC, Spring Batch, MongoDB etc.
  • Exposed backend application metrics to Prometheus and displayed them in Grafana
  • Developed level 3 RESTful APIs (HATEOAS) for web frontends and mobile apps
  • Developed an online booking solution for restaurants, hotels, beauty businesses, and consultancy services
  • Implemented Spring-based backend services with MongoDB as the main persistence technology
  • Built a login portal for customers and employees using Spring MVC, Thymeleaf, Spring Security, and OAuth2
  • Developed batch jobs and introduced Spring Batch, including a web application for batch administration

(more details online)

Junisphere Systems AG/Skoor (May 2007 – August 2013)

Java Developer (from October 2010)

Senior Java Developer (October 2010 – August 2013)

  • Technology evaluation for the new project, introducing Java, Spring
  • Architecture and design of the new solution
  • Evaluation and usage of NoSQL databases (MongoDB and Neo4j)
  • Introduced Scrum as the development process
  • Developed a new Business Service Management solution based on Java, Spring, and Spring MVC
  • Set up the development environment with Sonar, Maven, Confluence, Jira, Jenkins, and Mercurial
  • Worked with Eclipse, Spring Data Neo4j, Dojo, OSGi, Virgo, Equinox, Spring Dynamic Modules / OSGi Blueprint Services, and JMS with ActiveMQ and Apache Camel

Promotion to Senior Developer (September 2009)

C++ Developer

C++ Developer (May 2007 – October 2010)

  • Development and support (bug fixing) of the eRanger Business Service Management Application on FreeBSD in C++ (cmake, gcc)
  • Introduced AJAX and "web 2.0" functionality into the existing web application
  • New development of a Windows client that provides WMI performance data over a simple HTTP API via a self developed tiny embedded HTTP server
  • Developed and maintained eRanger measurement components that monitored target systems and gathered performance indicators over DHCP, DNS, SMTP, POP3, and IMAP, implementing these protocols asynchronously with Boost.Asio
  • Developed the web frontend in C++ using CGI
  • Introduced unit tests with Boost.Test and set up structured automated testing
  • Introduced an automated build process (continuous integration)
  • Provided third-level support

(more details online)

Sunrise (May 2004 – April 2007)

Software Developer IT (May 2006 – May 2007)

  • J2EE/Java development for the sunrise customer web portal
  • Web development with Spring, Spring MVC, Spring Webflow, Hibernate, Acegi
  • Worked with Oracle and PL/SQL
  • Connected the web portal to enterprise systems including Clarify and SAP over various protocols
  • Provided and consumed SOAP web services
  • Used the JBoss and ATG application servers, with Eclipse as the IDE

System Engineer ISP (September 2005 – May 2006)

  • Project lead
  • Setting up a new hosting infrastructure for internal services (what you nowadays would call PaaS)
  • Introducing automated Linux server installation, bare metal recovery, hardening, central patch management, central configuration, central authentication, backup solution, process design
  • Introducing virtualization technology
  • Participating in various projects as developer (Java, PHP, perl)

System Administrator ISP (May 2004 – September 2005)

  • Administration and operation of more than 300 Linux systems
  • Administration of MySQL databases and of the central OpenLDAP directory
  • Support and development of provisioning interfaces with perl, PHP and Java
  • Software packaging and deployment (RPM)
  • Gaining first experience in project management of smaller projects
  • 2nd level support and 24x7 on call duty

(more details online)

Other Practical Experience and Jobs during my Studies

  • Talk at Jazoon '12: Graph Database Modelling with Neo4j - A Case Study
  • After the "Matura" I was working for one year at the Migros-Klubschule in Chur as a computer teacher. During my studies I also worked for the WIN computer school and for the IFA as a computer teacher.
  • During my studies I could work 1 ½ years (2000/02) for Hewlett Packard (Australian Calculator Operation) and develop the communication tools (PC - calculator) for the calculators HP48/49 and HP38/39. This tool based on my open source project "HPComm", which was widely used in the HP community. In a team of two with Mitch Davis (see resume) we developed the tool based on Visual C++ using CVS. HPComm was then released as one of HPs first open source projects ever.
  • I started a lot of open source projects (esp. in Visual C++) during my studies where some of them were quite successful (like AGStreme - an audio galaxy client with more than 1 million downloads)
  • During my studies I stared with web development (esp. using PHP and MySQL) and created the site www.se-community.com which became one of the biggest German Sony Ericsson fan sites with 150'000 visitors and over 1 mio. page views per month.

Education

1981 – 1987 Primary school in Chur
1987 – 1994 Kantonsschule in Chur, Typus B
1995 – 2004 Studies of electrical engineering at the ETH Zurich

  • SS 1998 internship at ASCOM
  • SS 1999 1. semester thesis
  • 1999 – 2001 working for Hewlett-Packard
  • WS 2002/03 2nd semester thesis
  • SS 2003 final exams
  • WS 2003/04 diploma thesis

Jean-Pierre Bergamin, September 2026