Gerald Loeffler is an architect who codes and has a consultant’s mindset: he leads and works with technical teams and organisations creating software-intensive systems, particularly in the enterprise integration space. In doing so he draws on his copious project and industry experience, doing whatever it takes to consistently deliver successful projects and products. Depending on organisational context and needs, Gerald enjoys filling the role of architect, trainer, technical team lead or software development manager, sometimes combined with project manager or Scrum master. The technology domain he is intimately familiar with is object-oriented and functional software development on the JVM, also in Scala or Kotlin, for application development as well as system integration, using SOA, microservices, ESB-style and message-based integration and related enterprise software technologies and software engineering practices.
Gerald holds a PhD in Bioinformatics, an accredited MBA and an MSc in Psychology. He has attained these certifications: TOGAF 9 Foundation, ScrumMaster, PRINCE2 Foundation, MuleSoft Trainer, Certified Professional for Software Architecture, MuleSoft Certified Platform Architect Level 1 and Integration Architect Level 1, MuleSoft Certified Developer - Level 2, Lightbend Certified Reactive Architect, Kubernetes Application Developer, Apache Spark Developer, Guidewire Technical/Integration, Slack Certified Developer, Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder and Platform Developer I, Java EE Enterprise Architect, EJB Developer, Java Programmer, Mule ESB Developer, MuleSoft Connector Developer, API Designer with RAML.
Professional Experience
1/2021 – now:
Principal Architect, Head of MuleSoft Training Center for Technical Enablement, Salesforce (initially: Principal Technical Architect - MuleSoft Training Portfolio)
The “MuleSoft Training Center for Technical Enablement” (“Training C4E” for short) is a dedicated global team within the MuleSoft Training organisation that supports this organisation and specifically the MuleSoft Training and Certification Portfolio team with technical expertise such as product and industry insights and best practices pertinent to the MuleSoft training portfolio.
The Training C4E comprises experienced senior professionals in all architecture domains, including technical, solution, and enterprise architecture. The Training C4E supports the MuleSoft Training and Certification Portfolio team in developing the vision, the design, and the implementation of the entire MuleSoft training portfolio. This support consists in guidance, advice, research, analyses, enablement, quality control, and occasional limited hands-on curriculum development activities, and is focused on the technical, product, and architectural content of the training portfolio. Where beneficial, enablement activities are extended to the entire MuleSoft Training organisation. As an expression of its goals, the Training C4E is accountable for the technical correctness of the entire training portfolio, including all courses and certifications. To keep the training portfolio current and relevant, the Training C4E proposes changes and additions to the portfolio for the consideration of the MuleSoft Training leadership.
Architecture, design and implementation of cloud-native enterprise integration solutions for educational purposes; creation of training courses and certifications based on or informed by these integration solutions; enablement of MuleSoft’s global team of instructors to teach these courses; and occasional delivery of these courses to MuleSoft customers in EMEA and the USA. Sporadic consulting engagements in integration architecture with MuleSoft’s clients under the banner of MuleSoft Professional Services.
Proposal, design and development of a new training course that teaches experienced Entperise and Solution Architects how to architect and design API-centric cloud-native applications for Anypoint Platorm, MuleSoft’s multi-cloud API and enterprise integration development and deployment platform. See https://training.mulesoft.com/instructor-led-training/aparch-application-networks.
Head of Development, Cortical.io, Vienna (permanent employment)
Growing and professionalising the software development organisation of a start-up in the NLP and semantic text processing space, with slightly less than a dozen data scientists and software engineers, engaged in professional services and pre-sales customer projects as well as internal software product development.
Creation of recruitment and people management processes and management of the technical team accordingly.
Establishment of a project-centric organisational structure and processes for customer projects and product development.
Steering of long-term product direction and short-term scope of activities within this structure.
Refinement and standardisation of software engineering practices.
Contribution to day-to-day technical activities as project manager/Scrum master, architect and developer.
Scala, Java, Spring Boot, Apache Spark, AWS, natural language processing, machine learning.
3/2014 – 10/2015:
Principal Solutions Architect EMEA, Professional Services, MuleSoft (permanent employment through German subsidiary; initially: Senior Solutions Architect)
Consultant in integration architecture and implementation for MuleSoft’s clients.
Insurance company, London, 16 weeks: technical guidance to large offshore Mule ESB development team; performance investigations and analysis of complex service-oriented system. Mule ESB, Guidewire Insurance Suite, Spring Framework, SOAP/WSDL, XSD, CXF, clustered ActiveMQ, JMS, Teradata, Oracle, Java, JMX, Maven; data analysis using Spark/Scala.
Retailer, London, 17 weeks: project management and technical leadership, formulation of microservices-based integration software development meta-architecture, framework and continuous delivery pipeline and its exemplary realisation through a few production services. Mule ESB, Spring Framework, RESTful APIs, SOAP/WSDL, XSD, CXF, REST, JSON, JSON-Schema, SAP ERP, Java, Jenkins, SOAPUI, Maven and plugins.
Energy utility company, Nottingham, 2 weeks: architecture and project proposal for phased realisation of complex system replacement initiative.
Supermarket chain, Germany, 7 weeks: enterprise integration architecture and phased legacy modernisation concept for this international German-owned retailer, addressing both HQ and distributed store systems.
Media venture, Sweden, 4 weeks: performance-focused architecture proposal, prototyping and evaluation thereof for greenfield AWS/EC2-hosted video streaming platform. CloudHub, Amazon VPC, Amazon ELB, nginx, RESTful APIs, JMeter; data analysis using Spark/Scala.
Insurance company, London, 10 weeks: development for a new cloud-hosted SalesForce-to-legacy data replication solution; designed and implemented the legacy-facing component exposing web services and encapsulating complex data consolidation and transformation. SalesForce, AWS-hosted iPaaS CloudHub, Spring Framework, SOAP/WSDL/XSD, CXF, JSON, Jackson, Java, Maven.
1/2008 – 2/2014:
Senior Integration Architect EMEA, Professional Services, Guidewire Software (permanent employment through German subsidiary; initially: Integration Architect)
Customer-facing, project-centred delivery management, architecture, design, development and training for integrating next-generation core insurance systems into an organisations enterprise IT systems.
Guidewire’s Technical Lead and integration team project manager for the inception, pre-development and early development phases of a large-scale core insurance systems (policy, billing, claims) replacement project at an insurance carrier in London, UK. 7 Months duration. Large distributed development team. Java EE web profile, Guidewire ClaimCenter, PolicyCenter, BillingCenter, ContactManager and platform APIs, Mule ESB, Axis, Oracle 12g.
Integration Architect, Guidewire’s Technical Lead and integration team project manager for the inception and development phases of a project replacing two claims systems of an insurance carrier in Milan, Italy. 18 months duration, approx. 15 people in development project team. Java EE web profile, Guidewire ClaimCenter and platform APIs, Axis. IBM WebSphere MQ, Oracle 11g, JBoss AS.
Integration Architect, Guidewire’s Technical Lead and integration team project manager for a project implementing a billing system at an insurance company in Warwickshire, UK. 17 months duration, approx. 18 people in development project team. Java EE web profile, Guidewire BillingCenter and platform APIs, Axis. IBM WebSphere MQ and Broker, Microsoft SQL Server, Tomcat.
Delivery of in-depth hands-on technical workshops and presentation of various technical aspects of Guidewire software products to a wide range of audiences in a pre-sales context.
Development of training courses targeting developers and architects integrating with Guidewire software products, and delivery thereof to several Guidewire customers in the USA.
3/2007 – 12/2007:
Senior Architect/Developer, ObjectLab Financial Ltd, London (permanent employment)
Internal enterprise Java software development for a financial software product targeted at the investment banking market.
Motivated and led the architectural refactoring of this large Java EE application to leverage dependency injection and AOP principles using Spring 2.5.
Added an ESB-style integration frontend to said application using Mule 1.4 and a distributed store-and-forward messaging fabric using ActiveMQ 4.1.1, and used this to interface with an external financial system.
Designed and implemented a message-centric XML data export/import sub-system using JAXB 2.1 and Dozer 4.2.
9/2006 – 2/2007:
Enterprise Architect and Team Lead Architecture and Java Software Development, ING Direct (ING-DiBa) Austria, Vienna (permanent employment)
Contributed to the establishment of a Java EE-based SOA and BPM strategy and managed a team of 2 architects and 9 Java software developers (both internal and external; hiring 4).
Augmented an existing Java-only SOA with WS-I Basic Profile conformant web service bindings based on JAX-WS 2.1 and JAXB 2.1. Drove the modernization and re-design of the corresponding service interfaces and implementations.
Led architecting and implementing a complete end-to-end blueprint for BPM (business process management) through transactional service orchestration and human task handling with JBoss jBPM.
Improved software engineering foundations by prioritizing fully-automated build/package/deploy, product versioning, continuous integration and a rounded SOA-compatible automated test approach.
Argued for the extension of the principles of componentisation and separation-of-concern beyond the Java sphere across the entire enterprise software architecture.
6/2005 – 5/2006:
Enterprise Software Architect, ShipServ Ltd, London (permanent employment)
Identification, evaluation and recommendation of software architectural choices; implementation of enterprise Java software following these architectural guidelines; supporting the IT team in the adoption of new software development and software engineering technologies.
Comprehensive re-design of ShipServ’s software architecture around SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) principles: WSDL-first approach to establish a WS-I Basic Profile conformant document-centric web service layer using JAX-WS 2.0. Re-use of the established XML vocabularies OASIS UBL 1.0 and xAL 3.0. Java EE 5.0 on JBoss 4.
Application architect and developer for ShipServ Pages, a web-based maritime supplier search service, as a proof-of-concept for this architecture and a strategically important product for ShipServ. JSF, JAX-WS 2.0, EJB 3.0, JBoss 4, Tomcat 5.5.
4/2005 – 5/2005:
Technical Architect, Enterprise Java Solution Centre, Capgemini UK, London (permanent employment)
2/2001 – 2/2005:
Consulting Java Architect, Professional Services, Sun Microsystems (permanent employment through Austrian subsidiary)
Advising Sun’s customers on various aspects of enterprise software development, often as project manager, software architect, object-oriented designer, Java developer and mentor in medium-size enterprise software development projects at customer sites for several months. Selected projects and roles:
Lead Architect for “T-Com ID Server”, a Liberty-compliant identity management and Single-Sign On solution for a German telecom’s customer-facing web applications, integrating existing identity systems. Essen, Germany. 3 months duration, approx. 15 people in project team. J2EE, Spring framework, Struts, SourceID Liberty client framework. IBM WebSphere application server and MQ, Oracle 9.2 RAC, Sun Java System Web Server, Access Manager and others.
Technical Project Manager for the largest Austrian telecom’s 2nd-generation implementation of the “A1 Organizer”, a multi-device (web, WAP, PDA, SMS) wireless portal. 3 month duration, 7 people in project team. Complete range of Sun Java Enterprise System 2 software products, including Portal, Application and Identity Server.
Portal Architect for the largest Austrian telecom’s “Vodafone Mail” portal application for mobile phone devices. 4 month duration, 5 people in project team. System architecture, mentoring.
Developer for a large German telecom’s “Legal Mail Interception” project in Düsseldorf, Germany. 3 month duration, 6 people in project team. J2SE, JavaMail, JNDI; SunONE Messaging Server and Directory Server.
Component Lead and Project Manager for the largest Dutch telecom’s Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) implementation and iMode-MMS-Gateway, respectively, in Den Haag, The Netherlands. 7 month duration, approx. 12 people in project team. Prince2 project management methodology; J2EE (EJBs, Servlets, JavaMail); LogicaCMG wireless infrastructure products (MMSC, WSB, Wap-Gateway, Push Proxy Gateway); SunONE enterprise software products: Application Server, Message Queue, Directory Server.
Technical Project Manager for the largest Austrian telecom’s “A1 Organizer” (see above). 7 month duration, approx. 13 people in project team. PRINCE2 project management methodology; J2EE (JSPs, Servlets); SunONE enterprise software products: Portal Server, Messaging Server, Calendar Server, Application Server, Directory Server.
J2EE Architect for project at a large German Bank in Frankfurt developing a distributed private banking portfolio management system. 5 month duration, approx. 30 people in project team. J2EE (EJBs, JMS), Swing; BEA WebLogic 6.1, Oracle 9i, IBM MQSeries.
Consultant for architecture, OO-design and prototype implementation for high-throughput execution platform for intelligent software agents at an Austrian start-up. 6 month duration, 8 people in project team. J2SE; IBM DB2.
3/2000 – 1/2001:
Software Architect, Research Institute of Molecular Pathology, Vienna (fixed-term employment)
Requirements engineering, architecture, design and implementation in Bioinformatics software development projects:
JMIMS, an enterprise information management system for the production and usage of cDNA microarrays in support of the in-house microarray facility. J2EE (JSPs, Servlets), OQL; Tomcat, POET OODBMS.
A web-based data-management system for protein sequence analysis. J2EE (JSPs, Servlets), OQL; Tomcat, POET OODBMS.
9/1999 – 1/2001:
Contractor in object-oriented analysis, design and implementation in Java (self-employed)
Analyst and Requirements Engineer for a workflow project at MorphoSys AG (medium-sized German biotechnology company) in Munich, covering the scientific core competency of that company (antibody generation). approx. 4 month duration. Interviews, use-case modelling, OOA, UML; Java prototype implementation.
Java Web component developer for small Austrian software company. HTML/JavaScript, Applets, J2EE (JSPs, servlets), XML, XSLT; Tomcat, Oracle8i; Linux.
3/1999 – 2/2000:
Software Developer and Software Architect, Apollo Imaging, Vienna (permanent employment)
Architecture, design and implementation of client tier and application server tier of an Intra/Internet front-end to a multimedia database. HTML/JavaScript, Applets, J2EE (JSPs, servlets), XML, XSLT; Apache Web Server, Tomcat, Oracle8i; Irix.
Requirements engineering, functional specification and project management for outsourced Bioinformatics (functional genomics) software development projects.
Data science, design and implementation of numerical/statistical algorithms using R for the analysis of DNA microarray data and their correlation with clinical data.
Protein and DNA sequence analysis.
2/1997 – 1/1998:
Postdoctoral Research Scientist, Research Institute of Molecular Pathology, Vienna (fixed-term employment)
Scientific software development and data science in Bioinformatics (Langevin and Molecular Dynamics, electrostatic potential of proteins). Java, C++, Fortran, scientific visualization; Irix, Linux, Windows.
12/1994 – 5/1996:
UNIX system and network administrator, Molecular Dynamics group, Institute for Theoretical Chemistry, University of Vienna (fixed-term employment)
Workstations by SGI, HP and Sun
10/1994 – 1/1995:
Tutorial leader for Parallel Algorithms in the Computer Simulation of Bio-molecules at the Institute for Theoretical Chemistry, University of Vienna (fixed-term employment)
7/1989 – 6/1994:
Contractor in software development, university tutorial demonstrator and other part-time jobs in chemistry/biology laboratories
Education, Certification, Training
Please note that most professional certifications expire: given below is the date of the original certification; no claim is made that these certifications are still valid.
1/2023:
Certified MuleSoft Integration Associate
12/2022:
Certified Professional for Software Architecture (CPSA) Foundation Level, iSAQB
Master of Science (MSc) in Psychology (Distinction) at The Open University
10/2008:
Certified ScrumMaster awarded by the Scrum Alliance
1/2008:
Guidewire Integration Certification
12/2007:
Sun Certified Enterprise Architect for the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 5 (SCEA for Java EE 5)
5/2003 – 10/2006:
Master of Business Administration (MBA), accredited by AMBA, AACSB and EFMD/EQUIS, at The Open University Business School
6/2004:
Cambridge Certificate of Proficiency in English (CPE) (grade A), the highest level (C2) of the Cambridge exams in English for speakers of other languages
6/2004:
Intensive 2 weeks hands-on training on Test-Driven Development at XPLabs
4/2003:
PRINCE2 Foundation project management certification
11/2001:
Principles of Managing Iterative Development (i.e., the Rational Unified Software Development Process) by Rational University
6/2001:
Enterprise Development with iPlanet Application Server 6.0 Enterprise Edition by iPlanet
11/1998:
Sun Certified Java Programmer 1.1
5/1995 – 7/1995:
Training and Research on Advanced Computing Systems (TRACS) at Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC) sponsored by the Human Capital and Mobility Programme of the EU
5/1994 – 1/1997:
Doctor rerum naturalium (Dr. rer. nat., PhD) in Bioinformatics in Prof. Steinhauser’s group at the University of Vienna. PhD thesis entitled “The Calculation of the Dielectric Properties of Many-Component Systems from Molecular Dynamics Simulations”. Software development and data science in Java, C++ and Fortran.
10/1987 – 5/1994:
Magister rerum naturalium (Mag. rer. nat., equivalent to Bachelor of Science (BSc) plus Master of Science (MSc)) in Biochemistry at the University of Vienna. Masters thesis in the area of Bioinformatics entitled “Efficient and Correct Treatment of Electrostatic Interactions in Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Hydrated Systems”. Software development and data science in C.
9/1975 – 6/1987:
School in Vienna
Skills
Languages:
German (native), English (mastery, C2), Italian (upper intermediate, B2)
Knowledge domains:
biochemistry, bioinformatics, computational biophysics, applied statistics, data science, machine learning, natural language processing, mathematics, software engineering, general (P&C) insurance, project management
Software development:
system integration, system and software architecture, service-oriented architecture (SOA) and design incl. microservices and RESTful design, design patterns for distributed and concurrent software, distributed and parallel computing, object-oriented analysis and design (OOA&D), relational database design
Selected Topics in Java Web Application Development, guest lecture in “Web Engineering I” at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration on 27 October 2008.
Enterprise Java: central concepts in Java EE 5 (German), 2-day course at the Institute for Systems Software at the University of Linz on 9/10 March 2006.
J2EE: Introduction, Practice and Software Architecture, 2-day course at the Institute for Systems Software at the University of Linz on 3/4 March 2005.
Building Web Applications in Java - Foundation and Best Practices, power workshop at W-JAX - Conference for Web Services, Java, Apache, XML in Munich, Germany on 4 Nov 2002.
G. Löffler, P. Steinlein, JMIMS - the Java Microarray Information Management System, Microarray Data Standards Meeting in Heidelberg, Germany (2000).
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B. Eisenhaber, P. Bork, Y. Yuan, G. Löffler, F. Eisenhaber, Automated annotation of GPI anchor sites: case study C. elegans, Trends Biochem Sci., 25 (7), 340-341 (2000).
C. Stratowa G. Löffler, P. Lichter, S. Stilgenbauer, P. Haberl, N. Schweifer, H. Dohner, K.K. Wilgenbus, CDNA microarray gene expression analysis of B-cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia proposes potential new prognostic markers involved in lymphocyte trafficking, Int J Cancer, 91, 474-480 (2001).
BioSymphony Beans: Software Components and Data Models for Bioinformatics, presentation with Anatoli Krassavine at Objects in Bioinformatics Conference in Hinxton, UK, 1998.
[10]
G. Löffler, Poisson-Boltzmann Calculations vs. Molecular Dynamics Simulations for Calculating the Electrostatic Potential of a Solvated Peptide, Theoretical Chemistry Accounts, 101 (1-3), 163-169 (1999).
G. Löffler, A Multithreaded Java Framework for Solving Linear Elliptic Partial Differential Equations in 3D, Scientific Computing in Object-Oriented Parallel Environments, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1343, 121 - 128 (1997).
G. Löffler, H. Schreiber, O. Steinhauser, Calculation of the Dielectric Properties of a Protein and its Solvent: Theorie and a Case Study, Journal of Molecular Biology, 270 (3), 520 - 534 (1997).
G. Löffler, H. Schreiber, O. Steinhauser, The Frequency-Dependent Conductivity of a Saturated Solution of ZnBr2 in Water: A Molecular Dynamics Simulation, Journal of Chemical Physics, 107 (8), 3135 - 3143 (1997).
O. Steinhauser, H. Schreiber, G. Löffler, W. Kleinert, Parallel Biomolecular Simulation: Theory, Algorithms and Implementation, Simulation Practice and Theory, 5, 573 - 603 (1997).
G. Löffler, H. Schreiber, Parallel Biomolecular Simulation: An Overview and Analysis of Important Algorithms, High-Performance Computing and Networking, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1067, 929 - 934 (1996).
G. Löffler, T. Mager, C. Gerner, H. Schreiber, H. Bertagnolli, O. Steinhauser, Static and Dynamic Structural Analysis of a Saturated Solution of ZnBr2 in Water: Anomalous X-Ray Diffraction and Molecular Dynamics Simulations, Journal of Chemical Physics, 104 (18), 7239 - 7248 (1996).
G. Löffler, P. Maccallum, Molecular Dynamics of Solvated Proteins on the Cray T3D: Algorithms, Implementation, Benchmarks and Results, poster at ParCo 95 Conference in Gent, Belgium (1995).
[2]
G. Löffler, H. Schreiber, O. Steinhauser, Computer Simulation as a Tool to Analyze Neutron Scattering Experiments: Water at Supercritical Temperatures, Berichte der Bunsengesellschaft für Physikalische Chemie, 98 (12), 1575 - 1578 (1994).
[1]
G. Löffler, W. Robien, Automatic Analysis of 13C-NMR-Spektra of Mixtures, poster at CIC-Meeting in Oldenburg, Germany (1990).