Marc Wäckerlin

Chief Technology Officer

Scrypt•  March 2023 - Present

As the Chief Technology Officer at Scrypt, I lead the strategic technological direction of the company. Building upon a rich background in software development and innovation, I oversee the establishment of agile technical teams specialized in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), frontend, and backend development. My role encompasses architecting and implementing a robust CI/CD pipeline with deployment capabilities, facilitating efficient and rapid software delivery. Collaborating closely with cross-functional teams, I drive the development of applications crucial to sales, trading, market making, and end-customer integration, ensuring Scrypt remains at the forefront of the crypto asset market. Additionally, I prioritize the technical security of the organization, assuming the responsibilities of a Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), and consistently striving to uphold the highest standards of compliance and operational excellence.

Chief Technology Officer

Sygnum•  August 2021 - March 2023

Sygnum is the first Swiss crypto bank with a banking license and was founded in 2018. With around 250 employees, it enables institutional investors to invest in digital assets. Built up and stabilized the teams after resignation of many key persons immediately before I took over, hired 21 additional engineers and a manager, with no more unwanted attrition since then. Responsible for 10 (+9 new hires) Developers in Singapore, in Zürich 15 Developers (+7 hires, including a head of software engineering), 7 SREs (+6 hires, plus promotion of new head) and coordination of about 50 externals all around the world. Optimized the hiring process, saved up to 90% of the time spent on interviews through a better process and the use of a qualification tool. Strengthened the communication between teams and departments, breaking down silos by introducing a joint architectural working group to secure cross divisional exchange. Increased efficiency by identifying duplicate solutions and introducing a common standardized toolstack accross the organization together with the teams, so that developers can share experiences more directly and benefit from each other's work. Built a specialized team to automate repetitive tasks by writing blueprints, templates and generators, so that a new project goes from instantiation to test deployment in the AWS cloud in 10 minutes instead of several days, while reducing all communication for that task to one MR approval by the SRE team (4 eyes principle). Introduced and led the implementation of a comprehensive scalable modular microservices-based orchestrated re-architecture, which will serve thousands of customers simultaneously and has just passed proof of concept and initial performance testing. Assigned our most experienced front-end engineer (one of the new hires) his own team to take care of the front-end, which results in a monorepo-based approach that has already been used to redesign the main portal, which is much appreciated by our customers; when I took over, each team was building its own front-end based on five different frameworks.

Software Engineer

Sygnum•  August 2020 - August 2021

Bridged the gap between development and SRE with expertise in both spheres. Developed for Ethereum / Polygon Tokenization using NestJS, TypeORM, Web3js, PostgresSQL, Kafka, Redis. Technical project management, introduced a complete new client onboarding in ReactJS with Zeebe (Camunda 8) BPMN, that automates many manual processes. GitLab CI/CD pipeline improvements for the SRE team, e.g. safe password injection through Hashicorp Vault integration and massive reduction in Docker image size.

Software Engineer

SwissSign•  September 2008 - August 2020

Developed client tools for SuisseID, introduced C++ with Qt on Linux including the whole tool chain to support builds for Linux, Windows, Mac OS/X client software. Built up and operated the full development environment, including Dokuwiki, central user administration and assignment of rights with OpenLDAP / LAM, file exchange with OwnCloud, development with Trac, Subversion, later also Git, introduced CI/CD-pipeline first based on CruiseControl, later migrated to Jenkins. Managed, maintained and improved websites, SuisseID online shop based on PHP / Joomla and Virtuemart. Managed additional projects, e.g. for transition SHA1 to SHA2 or extensions to fulfill enterprise customer’s needs. Introduced and developed DevOps cloud infrastructure based on Rancher / Kubernetes including continuous integration and deployment. Analyzed security issues in the role of Security Champion. Automated customer registration in the CA (Certified Authority) software in Perl. Stabilized the production, automated the deployment by dockerization of the whole CA software, breaking it up to micro services and migrating from virtual machines to the cloud.

Software Engineer

Siemens•  March 1995 - September 2008

Software development in C++ on UNIX (first Solaris, later Linux) in the network and telecommunication area, in ripple control (control signals on power lines) and for the LSVA (Qt-GUI). Consulting in stabilisation task force for code quality and coding guidelines with analysis and teaching in Siemens branches in Munich, Ulm, Vienna, Budapest, Wrocław, severa lweeks stay in Milan.

Software Engineer

Walesch Electronic•  January 1987 - March 1995

Software development for measuring devices (vibration measurement and heating control) and a milling machine (control and GUI for programming) with Turbopascal on MS-DOS.

Teaching Assistant

ETH Zurich - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich•  January 1993 - September 1994

Teaching assistant in electrical engineering.