Niko Lubbe

Co-founded and built an operations platform for device retailers with TypeScript, React, TanStack Start and Convex. Own architecture, development, testing, deployment and production support. Built inventory, fulfilment, invoicing and B2B portals, plus AI document and product imports with deterministic validation and human review. Share product direction with my co-founder.

Built K42's TypeScript/React administration console from scratch and owned it as the sole frontend engineer. Enabled clients and operators to inspect retail promotion codes, transactions, basket contents and redemptions. Completed an inherited federated GraphQL implementation and migrated the live console to REST without downtime. Contributed backend API changes within the Kepler 16 team.

Designed, built and operated a self-updating Go service for 3,500+ point-of-sale devices across Southeast Asia and the UK. Distributed application updates on Windows and macOS, with automatic rollback when a new version failed to start. Owned testing, monitoring and rollout investigations. Continuous Kepler 16 role also included the GVNG and K42 assignments listed separately.

Audited GVNG's fundraising platform, presented findings to the board and recommended a rebuild. As sole engineer, designed, built, tested and launched the replacement in four months against a six-month estimate, using Next.js and MySQL on PlanetScale. Turned the product owner's requirements into the delivery plan, then helped hire and onboard two developers through a two-month handover.

Replaced fragile Bash installers with idempotent Ansible automation for Kubernetes-based legal software across AWS, Azure and Linux. Made failed installs recoverable and unified installation and upgrades, reducing upgrade work from days to hours. Paired on disposable EC2 Spot development environments, owning the Go CLI and terminal UI used to create, inspect and destroy them.

Built a Go runtime that kept existing Python processing code running as web services on Kubernetes, avoiding repeated startup costs and allowing independent scaling. Added a service registry, REST migrations and Jaeger tracing for PwC's Digital Solutions Store. Rewrote one Python module in Go to run about 4x faster and helped teammates adopt Go. Production rollout was owned by the team lead.

Employed by Frontmen and assigned full-time to PwC's Digital Solutions Store. Worked on backend runtime and supporting services for a Kubernetes-based platform used by tax and finance specialists to process documents and generate reports. Contributed Go service development, REST APIs and distributed tracing. See the PwC assignment for project details.

Built fraud controls in Luno's Fraud and Compliance team. Owned the analyst rules editor and contributed to rule storage for a global system handling thousands of requests per second. Analysts could replay proposed rules against historical data and publish changes almost immediately. Integrated Sift risk scores and World-Check screening, and built randomized quality-assurance review queues.

Promoted to Senior Software Engineer. Highlights across my 2015-2018 tenure: built the full React storefront, expanded reporting from 4 to 23 reports, and reduced table responses from 5-10 seconds to under 500 ms. Improved checkout from about 2.5 seconds to under 300 ms and helped design unit-level barcode checks that prevented incorrect shipments. Storefront cutover followed my departure.

Joined as a full-stack engineer for a daily-deals retailer, initially supporting another engineer and later reporting directly to the CTO as a peer. Worked across storefront development, internal reporting, checkout performance and operational tools. Built relationships with buyers and operations teams to identify problems. Promoted in November 2017; tenure-wide highlights are in the senior role.

Started while at university, building the company website with jQuery and extending the Launchpad campus-management frontend. Built reusable AngularJS client portals. Prototyped a solution to bypass a long wait for an external consultant, then took sole ownership of printer-terminal and card-reader software, owning development, testing and technical decisions. The company rolled out the solution.