Curriculum Vitae

Personal Details

Jean-Pierre Bergamin

NameJean-Pierre Bergamin
LocationZurich, Switzerland
Phone+41 78 614 14 92
E-Mailjames@ractive.ch
Stackoverflowstackoverflow.com/users/285288/james
Githubgithub.com/ractive
Websiteractive.ch

Management Summary

Worked on and led development at local.ch and now comparis.ch, two of the most widely used platforms in Switzerland with millions of users.

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, and Kubernetes

Leadership & Strategy

  • Leading and growing engineering teams by hiring directly, onboarding, mentoring, and creating an environment where developers take ownership
  • 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

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
  • 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)

  • 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)

  • 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

  • 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.

(more details on LinkedIn)

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

Java Developer (from October 2010)

  • 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

Promotion to Senior Developer (September 2009)

C++ Developer

  • 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

(more details on LinkedIn)

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

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 on LinkedIn)

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 2025