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Resume for Stig Sæther Nordahl Bakken

Work Experience

This is an outline, further details are available on request.

May 2025-present: Sunstone Institute AS

CTO

Data and cloud strategy, data architecture and processes.

Dec 2020-Apr 2025: Huawei Cloud

Database Senior Architect

Design and implementation aspects of two HTAP (hybrid OLTP/OLAP) database products for use with GaussDB for MySQL (similar to AWS Aurora):

  • Orion: ClickHouse-based solution with replication latency of seconds, designed and implemented (in a small team) transaction support, usability improvements and performance improvements.
  • Hermes: DuckDB-based solution with replication latency of milliseconds, designed and implemented metrics/monitoring system and cloud control plane integration. Large team.

Technologies involved: C++20, CMake, MySQL, Python, ClickHouse, DuckDB, OpenMetrics, Prometheus, Docker, Ansible

Dec 2019-Nov 2020: TietoEVRY Financial Crime Prevention

Principal Software Engineer

Primary focus on data engineering for enabling efficient machine learning workflows for fraud detection.

Work included:

  • Cloud architecture for data warehouse / analytics workloads for the financial services division, got ClickHouse approved by the Enterprise Architecture Board.
  • Designed and led small team implementing PCI-connected data mirroring service, providing data catalog/governance features as well as aggregating data from Oracle, MySQL, plain CSV files and ClickHouse.
  • Tech/tools involved: Java, Kotlin, Python, Oracle, MySQL, ClickHouse, AWS, Azure, Kubernetes

May 2009-Nov 2019: Zedge

Chief Technology Officer

Work included:

  • Introduced SCRUM
  • Modernized existing (PHP) codebase, introduced code reviews
  • Containers / cloud migration, initially Mesos/Marathon, later Google Cloud / Kubernetes
  • Continuous integration/deployment (CI/CD) with Jenkins and Mesos/Marathon (2013-2017)
  • Continuous deployment / GitOps with GitLab and Kubernetes (2017-)
  • Internal tools for Continuous Experimentation
  • Mentoring/coaching technical staff, helping with all kinds of troubleshooting
  • Hiring - interviews, talks and meetups
  • Overall architecture and internal dev productivity / collaboration tools and processes
  • Data/platform engineering - led team building a new data pipeline+warehouse for apps/web with focus on developer productivity (DX) and automation.

2006-2009: Google

Senior Software Engineer (Infrastructure and Search Properties)

Work included:

  • Config-driven search (making it easier to repurpose core search)
  • System for elastically scaling a search cluster based on predicted traffic
  • Training data labeling system for Google News article category prediction
  • Updated Google Alerts UI
  • Recruiting - interviews and various talks around Europe

2003-2006: Yahoo! (acquisition, has since been acquired by Verizon)

Engineering Manager, Yahoo! Image Search (2005-2006)

Technical lead, Yahoo! Multimedia Search (2003-2004)

Some early contributions to in-house search platform called Vespa which has later been open sourced.

2003: Overture, later Yahoo! Search Marketing (acquisition)

Integrated FAST and AltaVista Multimedia Search products

1999-2003: Fast Search & Transfer (aquisition, has since been acquired by Microsoft)

  • Multimedia Search technical lead (2002-2003)
  • part of alltheweb.com frontend team (2001-2002)
  • built first FAST/Lycos Multimedia Search (1999)
  • maintained FAST FTP Search (1999-2003)
  • built and maintained FAST/Lycos MP3 Search (1999-2002)
  • contributed to improving PHP performance and functionality for FAST products

1996-1998: Co-founded Guardian Networks

  • main product 1: Hardened Linux distribution for firewalls (Guardian Networks Secure Linux)
  • main product 2: Web publishing platform
  • consulting work, including Unix sysadmin, Oracle, web development and building an academic Linux distribution

1995-1996: BIBSYS (Norwegian academic library database)

  • Unix systems engineer
    • Unix resource during port of BIBSYS application from VM/ESA to AIX
    • System administration and automation

1994-1995: NTNU IT department

  • internal Unix/networking training
  • built NTNU’s first centralized Unix account database
  • maintained heterogenous Unix software distribution system (Store)

1993: NTNU Institute for Petroleum Technology

  • summer internship installing AIX student lab

Publications

  • PHP 5 Power Programming (Bruce Perens’ Open Source Series) Prentice Hall 2004, 720 pages

    ISBN 0-13-147149-X (Published translations: Polish, German, Russian, Italian, Czech)

Internet / Open Source “claims to fame”

  • 1994: Implemented first web interface to MS160 Archie, later known as FTP Search
  • 1996-2003: Active member of the PHP Group, contributed support for Oracle, XML, DocBook-based documentation framework (still in use), Unix build system, extension package format+installer (PECL, still in use), some ODBC drivers, *printf and much more
  • 1999-2002: Held various PHP-related talks and workshops at PHP/Apache/Linux conferences in Europe/US
  • 2001-2004: Founded PHP Extension and Application Repository (PEAR) and built the initial infrastructure - later retired and handed off the project to The PEAR Group
  • Apache Software Foundation Emeritus

Nominations and Awards

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