Joakim Verona

Engineering Manager, Msc CE

In my role as an Engineering Manager, I lead DevSecOps transformations that empower organizations to excel in both technical and business landscapes. My teams and I manage large-scale systems, handling millions of real-time requests daily for platforms like Platsbanken, Sweden's biggest job board.

Over my career, I've honed my ability to tackle diverse challenges across banking and finance, telecom, industrial sectors, media, labor unions, gaming, and government agencies. This broad experience equips me with the versatility to inspire and guide teams to success in various contexts.

I combine deep technical knowledge with leadership qualites and business development know-how.

This broad skill-set allows me to ensure that every technical initiative aligns with organizational objectives, delivering tangible value.

Me and the teams I work with are responsible for large scale deployments of systems serving millions of real time requests per day to large user bases, such as Platsbanken, Swedens largest job board.

My business experience from large organizations such as Ericsson enables me to work on business development tasks.

I have worked with all aspects of software development since 1994, and want to highlight that I have experience since 2016 in artificial intelligence and machine learning.

My certifications in cybersecurity ensure that the systems I design and implement are robust and secure, adhering to the highest industry standards.

I hold a Master of Science in Computer Engineering from Linköping University. My experience with global organizations like Ericsson has equipped me with the ability to navigate complex business environments and drive impactful initiatives at scale.

Work

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Technical Account Manager
– Present

Serving as a trusted technical advisor to enterprise customers, helping them optimize their AWS environments for performance, reliability, and cost efficiency.

Providing proactive guidance on architecture reviews, operational best practices, and incident management. Acting as the primary technical point of contact, coordinating across AWS service teams to resolve issues and drive adoption of new services.

Supporting customers through infrastructure planning, security reviews, and Well-Architected assessments to ensure their cloud workloads meet operational excellence standards.

Jobtech Development

DevSecOps Engineering Manager
–

I was brought as an expert in DevSecOps and Agile, in order to build and manage a DevSecOps team from scratch, to enable the rapid scaling of the development organization, as well as supporting the management team and communication team.

I enabled delivery of machine learning solutions, sharing of open data, search engine solutions, for the benefit of the Swedish job market.

I worked as a solution architect to design a hybrid cloud deployment, using on premise clusters, AWS clusters, and Azure clusters.

The DevSecOps team is now successfully built, with seven engineers with roles including Developers, Security, Operations, Observability, and developer team liasons.

The development organization has successfully scaled to five development teams, and the DevSecOps mindset now permeates the entire organization.

We fully implement the security aspect of DevSecops integrating security considerations in our continuous integration pipelines, and in our observability platforms.

I'm also working with system architecture and engineering of our core products on hybrid cloud openshift deployments, in AWS, Azure, and On-premise Openshift and OKD installations.

As a government organization, Jobtechdev has strict needs auditing and regulatory compliance, such as GDPR. Jobtechdev is a fully remote organization, and my team implements and maintains a secure plattform for distributed work.

Jobtech is a department within Arbetsförmedlingen, and works with solutions for the job market

Arbetsförmedlingen

DevOps lead, Configuration manager, Software engineer
–

Arbetsförmedlingen faced difficulties with their development practices, and I was brought in as a an expert on DevOps, configuration management and Agile development processes to coordinate efforts for tens of Arbetsförmedlingens dedicated project teams.

My experience enabled the teams to move from outdated tools and processes, towards Agile DevOps continuous integration/Continuous delivery processes. I also took part in the product feature software engineering efforts.

As a government organization, Arbetsförmedlingen has strict needs auditing, and regulatory compliance, such as GDPR.

Ericsson

DevOps, Software Engineer
–

I was brought in as an expert on DevOps to modernize the development environment and raise developer efficiency across the board.

I implemented Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery for a development team of 20 engineers.

I also developed video components in Java/C/C++, and observability solutions.

I modernized version control management by migrating from Clearcase to Subversion.

MMX is a custom video conferencing solution for the hearing impaired, and offers many interesting technical challenges, with many different client/server technologies that must be integrated.

Google

Mentor for google summer of code 2014
–

Mentoring a student for the GNU organization within Google Summer of Code 2014

Mentor for google summer of code 2013
–

Mentoring a student for the GNU organization within Google Summer of Code 2013

Bwin

Devops lead, configuration manager, Software Engineer
–

I was brought in to implement DevOps throughout the organization of Bwin, migrating from homegrown solutions that were hard to maintain, to industry standard solutions supporting agile DevOps workflows, with strict needs for version management, auditing, and regulatory compliance.

Kindred Group

Configuration manager, Devops lead, Software Engineer
–

My mandate at Kindred Group was to implement DevOps team and DevOps throughout the international organization of Kindred Group across a range of gaming products, with strict needs for version management, auditing, and regulatory compliance.

Kindred Group especially faced a challenge of features getting stuck in quality assurance, so features could not be delivered in a timely manner, thus impacting revenue.

Kindred Group has teams in Stockholm, London and Malta, so a distributed work flow supporting the teams was communicated and implemented.

During my tenure, the development process bottlenecks where adressed, and successfully removed, and a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery flow was implemented.

Planview

Software Developer/Configuration Manager
–

I Improved the team collaboration product with new features like WebDAV, implemented client side c/c++ components, Python development, and managed the product release cycle.

Planview is a successful project collaboration SaaS provider.

Precisely

Consultant
–

I was brought in to elevate engineering competency in a team of statisticians. This enabled us to improve performance in big-data warehousing solutions.

Precisely works with data warehouse implementations in the Telecom and Banking sector.

Ericsson

Solution Architect
–

I worked with Ericsson’s customers to build solutions using the Jalda Micropayment platform during the sales process. I worked with both the engineering teams and the sales teams contributing to an overall more efficient sales process and successful customer implementations.

Technical pre-sales for the micro-payment system Jalda

CGI

Consultant Software Engineering
–

I was brought in to engineer world class corporate training software, giving our content creators an edge over the competition.

I worked with the technical aspects of productions, with C, C++ and multimedia-tools on Mac and Windows plattforms, as well as content generation together with customers

Linköping University

Adjunct Instructor
–

I teached several computer science and engineering classes.

Education

Projects

Certificates

Microsoft Certified Professional

Issued by Microsoft

ISTQB

Issued by ISTQB - International Software Testing Qualifications Board

Java architect

Issued by Sun Microsystems

Cap Gemini Architect

Issued by Cap Gemini

Publications

Practical DevOps

Published by PACKT Publishing

DevOps is a practical field that focuses on delivering business value as efficiently as possible. DevOps encompasses all the flows from code through testing environments to production environments. It stresses the cooperation between different roles, and how they can work together more closely, as the roots of the word imply—Development and Operations. After a quick refresher to DevOps and continuous delivery, we quickly move on to looking at how DevOps affects architecture. You'll create a sample enterprise Java application that you’ll continue to work with through the remaining chapters. Following this, we explore various code storage and build server options. You will then learn how to perform code testing with a few tools and deploy your test successfully. Next, you will learn how to monitor code for any anomalies and make sure it’s running properly. Finally, you will discover how to handle logs and keep track of the issues that affect processes

Skills

Programming Languages

  • Java
  • Python
  • Lisp
  • Bash
  • Babashka
  • Clojure
  • OCaml
  • C
  • C++
  • Perl
  • Go
  • Rust
  • Julia
  • R
  • Javascript
  • Java
  • Python
  • Lisp
  • Bash
  • OCaml
  • C
  • C++
  • Perl
  • R
  • Javascript
  • Ada
  • Lisp
  • C
  • C++

Front-End Development

  • HTML
  • Javascript
  • Android

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence

  • NVIDIA
  • MLOps
  • Tensorflow
  • OpenAI
  • LLM
  • RAG
  • ollama

Kubernetes, k8s, Containerization

  • Openshift
  • OKD
  • EKS
  • Docker
  • docker-compose

Engineering Management

  • People Management

Virtualization

  • Openshift
  • kvm
  • VMvare
  • Vbox
  • Vagrant
  • Red Hat Virtualization(RHEV)

Test Driven Development

  • JUnit
  • Test Automation
  • Behavior-Driven Development (BDD)

Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)

  • github-ci
  • Gitlab
  • gitlab-ci
  • jenkins
  • Tekton

Agile Methodologies

  • Scrum Master
  • Scrum Project Owner
  • DevSecOps
  • Kanban
  • Scaled Agile Framework

Back-End Web Development

  • Node.js
  • API Development
  • Representational State Transfer/Web API (REST)
  • Microservices

Technical Writing

  • Latex
  • Markdown
  • org

Mainframe

  • IBM z/OS
  • SaS Language

Linux

  • Red Hat Linux
  • Ubuntu
  • Fedora
  • Centos

Relational Databases

  • MySQL
  • PostgreSQL
  • Oracle
  • Sqlite
  • Mssql

Graph Databases

  • Datalog
  • Datomic
  • Datahike
  • Neo4J

Image Analysis and Processing

  • OpenCV
  • Inkscape
  • Gimp
  • ImageMagick

Requirements Analysis

Cloud Computing

  • Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  • Microsoft Azure
  • Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Java

  • Spring
  • JBoss
  • Maven

Observability

  • Opensearch
  • Kibana
  • Grafana
  • Google Analytics
  • Piwik
  • Munin

Software Development

  • Emacs
  • Eclipse

Configuration Management

  • Ansible
  • Puppet
  • Pyinfra

Version Control systems

  • Git
  • Subversion
  • Clearcase
  • Bazaar
  • Mercurial
  • CVS
  • Sourcesafe

Teaching

NOSQL databases

  • Elasticsearch
  • Opensearch
  • MongoDB
  • Redis
  • Valkey

Platforms

  • Linux
  • Unix
  • Windows

Cybersecurity

  • Internet Security
  • CISSP
  • Cloud Security

Languages

Svenska, Swedish

Flytande (Native proficiency)

English

Native proficiency

Español, Spanish

Competencia elemental (Elementary proficiency)

References

I have had the pleasure of working together with Joakim in my role as head of the Swedish Public Employment Service’s innovative division, JobTech Development. As head of the DevOps team, Joakim played a central role in the foundational development of the division and his team. Joakim is a highly competent technician with a unique ability to identify and solve technical problems in a creative way. As a means to continuously increase efficiency and security, Joakim demonstrates a strong ability to improve and optimize processes and the implementation of technical tools. Joakim has a deep understanding of the DevOps philosophy and actively contributes to building a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement. I strongly recommend Joakim as a highly skilled and motivated technician who would be an asset of value for any organization in need of his skill-set.

Gregory Golding : Head Of Department, Trygghetsfonden TSL

I have had the pleasure of working directly with Joakim Verona and can wholeheartedly recommend him as an exceptional leader and highly skilled technical expert.

As our team lead, Joakim has the ability to inspire and motivate, consistently leading us to achieve our goals while uncovering new opportunities for improvement. Colleagues across the organization often seek his views and counsel, reflecting his credibility and respect among peers.

Joakim’s commitment to growth is evident in his role as a senior computer scientist and mentor. He provides constructive feedback that fosters both professional and personal development within the team. By creating a collaborative environment where everyone’s ideas are valued, he has mentored several junior developers, guiding them towards independence and success.

His technical prowess in software development is unparalleled. Joakim is always up-to-date with the latest industry trends, and his insights have been pivotal in advancing our projects. He aims for simplicity, clarity, and standard solutions where possible, which has helped our organization reduce complexity in several areas. For instance, his leadership in enhancing our continuous integration and security practices was crucial to our project’s success.

Joakim is a rare talent, seamlessly bridging the gap between technical expertise and leadership. His dedication to excellence and commitment to the team’s success make him an indispensable asset to our organization. Under his guidance, I have gained invaluable knowledge and skills, and I am confident that anyone working with Joakim will benefit greatly from his experience and insight.I have had the pleasure of working directly with Joakim Verona and can wholeheartedly recommend him as an exceptional leader and highly skilled technical expert. As our team lead, Joakim has the ability to inspire and motivate, consistently leading us to achieve our goals while uncovering new opportunities for improvement. Colleagues across the organization often seek his views and counsel, reflecting his credibility and respect among peers. Joakim’s commitment to growth is evident in his role as a senior computer scientist and mentor. He provides constructive feedback that fosters both professional and personal development within the team. By creating a collaborative environment where everyone’s ideas are valued, he has mentored several junior developers, guiding them towards independence and success. His technical prowess in software development is unparalleled. Joakim is always up-to-date with the latest industry trends, and his insights have been pivotal in advancing our projects. He aims for simplicity, clarity, and standard solutions where possible, which has helped our organization reduce complexity in several areas. For instance, his leadership in enhancing our continuous integration and security practices was crucial to our project’s success. Joakim is a rare talent, seamlessly bridging the gap between technical expertise and leadership. His dedication to excellence and commitment to the team’s success make him an indispensable asset to our organization. Under his guidance, I have gained invaluable knowledge and skills, and I am confident that anyone working with Joakim will benefit greatly from his experience and insight.

Per Weijnitz : Senior Software Engineer, Arbetsförmedlingen

I had the privilege of working closely with Joakim during his time at the Swedish Public Employment Service, where we spent six years collaborating on the development of open digital infrastructure for Sweden’s labor market. For several of those years, I also had the honor of being Joakim’s manager.

Joakim is a driving force within DevSecOps and combines strong technical skills with a strategic mindset. He has a rare ability to turn ambitious visions into reality—something that has been deeply appreciated by leadership, partners, and colleagues alike. He’s also been an outstanding team lead for our DevSecOps team and a highly skilled backend developer.

Thanks to his deep technical expertise and his strong understanding of business development, cybersecurity, and the public sector, Joakim consistently brings valuable insights and solutions to complex challenges. He’s proactive, honest, and always ready to support and lift his teammates.

I would gladly work with Joakim again and give him my strongest recommendation for any role involving technical leadership or infrastructure development.

David Brunius : Head of Department, Arbetsförmedlingen