Projects

Pawel Kowalski

Software engineer · Bern, Switzerland

A software engineer with more than 15 years of experience building and running software systems, over 8 of them in technical leadership. I build high-performing teams and ship strategic products, and I care most about the design, usability, and implementation of digital products.

Career

  1. Tech Lead, Bedag AG

    2023 to present · Bern

    Tech lead on one of the teams building a new core banking system for the Canton of Bern's tax administration.

    • Replaces a COBOL platform with a modern Java system.
    • Issues and processes more than 2.5 million tax invoices a year, totalling over CHF 10 billion.

  2. Co-Founder, GObugfree AG

    2021 to present · Zurich

    Co-founded and built GObugfree, a Swiss bug-bounty platform where a crowd of vetted security researchers finds and reports vulnerabilities for companies.

    • Built the initial MVP, hired the engineering team, acquired the first 15 customers, and set up the first reseller relationships.
    • Grew the crowd to over 900 security consultants.
    • 780 confirmed vulnerabilities delivered in a single year.

  3. Chief Technology Officer, Mila AG

    2018 to 2021 · Zurich

    Joined Mila, a marketplace that connects independent technicians with customers facing technical issues, as a turnaround specialist and led the Product and Engineering team of 15.

    • Ran the platform behind 50,000 support cases a year, around CHF 4M in revenue.
    • Cut operating costs by more than half by reworking the Salesforce integration.
    • Scaled and launched the platform in Germany, the UK, Austria, and France.

  4. Co-Founder, iterativ GmbH

    2011 to 2018 · Bern

    Co-founded iterativ, a boutique software-engineering company building digital products for new business ideas, with an interdisciplinary team of seven engineers and UX specialists.

    • Delivered software for large Swiss companies including Swisscom, ABB, and SWITCH.
    • Led product search for Siroop (500k products on Elasticsearch) and Swisscom's MyService case-management system (120k cases a year).
    • Built helloclass, a class-management system rolled out to schools across all Swiss cantons.

  5. Application Engineer, UBS AG

    2005 to 2010 · Zurich

    Application engineer on the bank's ISToolset portfolio-management platform, a UBS Top 50 application.

    • Designed and built a core component processing around 500,000 business cases a day.
    • Provided technical management for the database, business, and testing specialists involved.

Education

Languages