mucoaid (Berlin Institute of Health)

lead platform engineer, contract · berlin · january to august 2023.

impact

• an ml platform that improves physicians’ detection of oral cancer by 80%. i gave it the engineering its purpose deserved.
• legacy typescript microservices refactored to 95% behaviour-driven coverage. the qa bugs and memory leaks went with it. one simple monolith where there had been many services.
• everything moved from google cloud to soc2 and hipaa compliant, resilient and secure infrastructure on aws, on terraform, with continuous delivery.

the organisation

the berlin institute of health at charité is one of europe’s leading biomedical research institutions. mucoaid is its pre-spin-off: transformer networks that detect oral mucosal lesions, led by dr tabea flügge. i directed its engineering under contract.

what i did

the pipeline was straightforward. mainly, the tests and the test-driven culture the engineering function had lacked, the devops initiative, and the migration. golang, terraform, cassandra, kubernetes, nats, rds, just.

what it meant

i directed engineering for medicine. a mistake there is not a bug. the standard was the one the physicians needed, not the one the codebase had.