Adam Szecówka

Swissblock Technologies is a quantitative hedge fund focused on crypto, with an expanding scope into traditional finance.
As a team leader, I manage the Data Engineering Team of four software engineers. My role combines hands-on software development with collaboration across teams and stakeholders, including shaping technical direction and planning team backlogs.

My team oversees several domains:
- Data Ingestion Engine (Crypto)
- Market State (Crypto)
- Account State (Crypto)
- Tax Calculations (Crypto)
- Market Data (Traditional Finance)
- Account State (Traditional Finance)

The system is built on a microservice architecture, deployed on Kubernetes, and has been running in production for over four years. Most services are implemented in Go, with a few components in Python.

Data Ingestion Engine (Go, Kafka, Cassandra, REST, WebSockets)

- Built ingestion pipelines processing 50k Kafka messages/sec and 200k Cassandra inserts/sec from crypto exchanges like Binance, Coinbase, Kraken
- Stabilized system: eliminated frequent crashes, introduced monitoring, alerts, and meaningful logs.
- Added comprehensive monitoring and alerting
- Led a seamless Cassandra schema migration (fixed unbounded partition, defined TTL) with zero client impact.
- Implemented OHLCV resampling as an event-driven system with retry and dead-letter queue patterns in Kafka.
- Automated local service setup, enabling developers to run production-like stacks easily.


Market State (Go, MongoDB, REST)

- Collected and managed metadata from exchanges.

Account State (Go, Postgresql, REST, WebSockets)
- My team took ownership of this domain when the main part was already implemented
- Extended functionality to support new instruments (e.g., perpetual swaps).
- Improved DB schema resulted in faster queries without any breaking changes. Because we need to combine data from REST and WS, we designed tables resampling event sourcing approach.
Tax Calculations (Crypto)

- Consolidated trade and funding fee data across services into a single Postgres DB.
- Enabled external teams to calculate taxes reliably from a single source of truth.

Traditional Finance

- Automated data synchronization between many data providers using SFTP with Google Cloud Storage for progress tracking.
- Designed complex SQL analytics queries on Refinitiv (LSEG) datasets (MS SQL). Optimized a 150-line P/E Ratio query from 2h to 14 minutes using temporary tables and query simplification.

Cross-team Contributions

- Supported the Platform (DevOps) Team in productionizing Kubernetes clusters (network policies, security contexts).
- Member of the Architecture Board:
- Introduced testcontainers in ArgoCI, GolangCI-Lint static checks.
- Secured Apache Kafka with SCRAM authentication and authorization rules.
- Proposed and standardized Slack communication practices (naming conventions, reduced private messages).
- Advocated Team Topologies principles (Thin Viable Platform, self-service DevOps).


Leadership

- Manage 3 direct reports: regular 1:1s, mentorship, and annual reviews.


More details: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/swissblock-technologies_were-excited-to-spotlight-adam-szec%C3%B3wka-activity-7264245098941464576-1WVn/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAXhAKoBrv9LRtG6ih39jUNSkpxg0aoDpZM

Contributed to the architecture and implementation of Kyma Compass github.com/kyma-incubator/compass, a central multi-tenant system for connecting and managing applications across multiple Kyma runtimes (Go, GraphQL, Postgres, Kubernetes).

Served as Productivity Quality Leader, responsible for removing technical blockers and improving developer efficiency.

Proposed, designed, and implemented Octopus github.com/kyma-incubator/octopus, a Kubernetes-based framework for running integration tests packaged as Docker images.

Worked on multiple SAP products, including https://github.com/kyma-project and YaaS.io.

Kyma Project — a cloud-native extensibility framework (Go, Kubernetes, GraphQL).

- Implemented Kubernetes controllers and Service Catalog brokers.
- Built automation tools for on-demand cluster provisioning and unstable component detection.

- Additional roles:
- Scrum Master
- Prow Working Group Leader (Oct 2018 – Jan 2019): Led the migration of CI from Jenkins to Prow, a Kubernetes-based CI/CD system, and defined the Kyma release process. The working group included around 10 members, and we successfully completed the migration on schedule.

YaaS.io — microservices platform (Go, Java – Spring Boot, Dropwizard; Redis, MongoDB, Amazon SQS; deployed on CloudFoundry).

- Developed and maintained REST microservices, including GDPR and SAP Integration Services.
- Operated in a full DevOps style: implementation, deployment, and production support.
- Additional role: Scrum Master (1.5 years).

UI Application Framework Developer – "Next Generation Cockpit Framework"
Technologies: Java, Spring, ZK

- Designed and implemented reusable UI components (widgets), streamlining application development across teams
- Ensured high extensibility of the framework, supporting scalable future enhancements

Helping students learning the following topics: Java, Spring, REST, TDD, SQL, Git, Heroku, clean code, design patterns. My responsibility included weekly online meetings and reviewing Pull Requests. All of my 3 students found a job after the course.

Working on project Asseco Medical Management Solutions.
Technologies: Java, Spring, Hibernate, Adobe Flex

- JUnit test developer
- configuration and maintenance Hudson C

Building user interface in GWT