Hi, I'm

SANDRO MONTANARI

About Me

I'm an energetic person who loves to be challenged. This can be in sports, where I climbed mountains as high as 5'895m or take my bike and pedal for 2'500km across 8 countries. This can also be in personal projects by building robots, apps, websites and 3D print RC planes, or in my professional life where I look for the most innovative environments.

I come with a strong engineering background in IT, data science and mechanical engineering as well as ample experience in senior IT management, both in large companies and in dynamic startup environments. My past and current profession also allowed me to hone my skills in product management, agile development, key account management and technical sales.

Can you provide my next professional challenge?

Projects

IT

IT

Learn about my IT projects, featured are:

  • This website
  • A CrossFit management platform I built and am hosting in production
  • My (almost fully) automated home
  • A blockchain delegate experience
  • A brain-teasing Android app
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Making

Making

I enjoy making things, let me show you a couple of projects:

  • A 3D printed R/C airplane
  • How I made my girlfriend a wedding ring
  • A solar-powered lawn mowing robot
  • My self-built keyboard
  • Restoration of a 1972 Harley
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Adventures

Adventures

I enjoy sporty challenges

  • Bicycle trip across 8 countries
  • Climbing the Matterhorn
  • 24h hours of non-stop sports
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Work & Experience

Note: For a PDF version of my CV, please see the contact section.

August 2022 — present

Head of Technology & Architecture, Senior Management

Bern, CH / Zürich, CH

Mobile Payment

Leading the entire development and architecture at TWINT.

Role: TWINT is the market leader in Swiss mobile payment solutions. Leading a team of lead architects governing the entire IT development & architecture of TWINT. Member of the senior management.

Responsibilities: Define company-wide IT strategy, take technological decisions on the company level, establish & realize the long-term stability & scalability.

Achievements: First CH financial institute to migrate to AWS, increased TWINT’s stability by 32%, significant cost reduction due to performance optimizations, scaled my team from 3 to 11 people.

April 2021 — July 2022

Lead Enterprise Architect, Management

Bern, CH / Zürich, CH

Mobile Payment

Leading the design of the target architecture at TWINT.

Role: Defining the target architecture for the product, establishing the technological vision and strategy for the company, reporting to the Head of Technology & Architecture.

Responsibilities: Define company-wide architecture & processes, lead & guide developers and business architects, coordinate & manage internal & external stakeholders

Achievements: Built international interoperability - made international payments possible with TWINT, established the basis for TWINT's IT migration to AWS.

April 2018 — April 2021

Director of Product, Member of the executive team

New York, USA / Lausanne, CH

Startup, Privacy Preserving Machine Learning, Cryptography

Train and use distributed models without learning anything about the secret distributed input data.

Role: Fifth member to join, started out coding on the product (still doing that), now owning the product development roadmap, line manager and key account manager, member of the executive team, reporting to the CEO. Spent a year working in the New York office.

Responsibilities: Executive duties, owning product roadmap, managing processes and agile development of the whole implementation team. Team lead of product management team. Sales, contract execution, POCs and production rollout at client’s sites worldwide.

Achievements: Transformed a research-based library to a industry-grade product, now integrated at customer’s sites. Managing the companies largest production customer account.

December 2016 — April 2018

Product Manager

Berne, CH

Swisscom Big Data Platform

Design, build and maintain the Swisscom Big Data Platform, ingest data and manage stakeholders.

Role: Product Manager for the Swisscom Big Data Platform. Building the main data lake for the largest Swiss telecom provider in-house and from scratch.

Responsibilities: Strategy, Roadmap, agile development process, stakeholder management, customer interactions, software development, 24/7 on-call duties.

Achievements: Building the product from an extended proof of concept to a mature enterprise platform, introducing agile development processes and customer interaction processes into the organization.

October 2013 — December 2016

Software development

Berne, CH

Remote Infrastructure Management Systems

Software development, cloud-based remote IT-infrastructure management system

Role: Develop an in-house built, cloud-based remote management solution for IT infrastructure using mostly open source technologies. Monitoring, incident management and alarming for your custom hardware out of the cloud.

Achievements: Bringing bleeding edge tech into the company, developed solution is still being used to date.

October 2012 — October 2013

Graduate Trainee Program

Berne, CH / Palo Alto, USA

One out of 10 Swiss university graduates to be selected for a company-internal trainee program of 1 year.

Roaming International Inter-Operator Tariff negotiations with partner networks.
Responsibilities: Full negotiation authority, signature of contracts.
Achievements: Cost savings of 120’000 CHF

Strategy Project in the Swisscom Outpost in Palo Alto, California, USA, identification of growth opportunities for the Swisscom strategy department.
Responsibilities: Representing Swisscom toward partners, business plan development, strategic recommendations.

Big Data In-depth data analytics on Swisscom wireless traffic.
Responsibilities: Query design, data mining and business recommendations.
Achievements: (Details under NDA) Cost savings and network traffic optimization.

February 2012 — September 2012

Industrial Master Thesis

Villaz-St-Pierre, CH

Control design of a Delta Robot

Role: Development and validation of an advanced control strategy and algorithm for industrial Delta Robots, guaranteeing very high precision (μm) and ultra quick response.

Responsibilities: Programming lead, control hardware selection, customer contact.

Achievements: Built said prototype robot which achieved design goals, thesis graded with highest mark.

More info

Education

Studies
EPFL 2010 — 2012 Master of Science (Grade 5.5)
Robotics, Automation and Control
2006 — 2010 Bachelor of Science
Mechanical Engineering
Continued Studies (extract)
Offensive Security 2020 Certified Professional - Penetration Testing
Stanford Online 2018 Deep Learning
SAFe 2018 Product Owner / Product Manager
Stanford Online 2016 Machine Learning
IT

Master Thesis

Industrial Delta Robot Control

Master Thesis on the development and validation of an advanced control strategy and algorithm for industrial Delta Robots, guaranteeing very high precision (μm) and ultra quick response. Graded with highest mark (6).

Skillz

Legend

  • Expert
  • Solid knowledge
  • Used it

Specializations

  • Full Stack Development
  • Software Development (Object Oriented)
  • Data Science
  • Automation & Intelligent Systems
  • Robotics & Mechatronics
  • Product Management
  • Specialized Sales
  • Business Development
  • Leadership
  • Agile Development

IT

  • Python
  • JavaScript
  • Docker
  • Kubernetes
  • AWS
  • GCP
  • Bash
  • Ansible
  • HTML & CSS
  • C / C++ (Microcontroller)
  • Java & Android SDK

Data Science

  • Numpy / SKLearn
  • Hadoop
  • Kafka
  • SQL
  • Common Apache Tools
  • Tensor Flow

Engineering

  • CATIA / SolidWorks / FreeCAD
  • Matlab / Octave / Scilab

Languages

  • German (Native)
  • English (C2)

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