Gerben de Graaf

CTO for Oper Credits, revolutionising the European mortgage origination market through AI-powered solutions.

As the recent Director of Global Support for the Backbase business-critical SaaS platform serving banks, I am responsible for managing three geographically distributed teams working in a follow-the-sun model. I am responsible for incident management, managing escalations and Problem management, driving the processes to standardise, executing root cause analysis, and addressing findings, with the goal to provide customers with a reliable, resilient and performant managed installation.

In addition I am responsible for three teams that provide application management & maintenance to ~35 banks and credit unions globally to ensure a high available and secure banking platform for their end users. Finally, I’m responsible for two Platform teams who are developing critical infrastructure components to support the SDLC for the 800-person Backbase R&D department.

I was requested to support our new Managed Hosting SaaS organisation to scale up the way of working, introduce structure to our system engineering teams and facilitate change management for our enterprise customers, ensuring the availability of dozens of online banks. As the primary people manager of 35 engineers across 5 different teams, I was responsible for managing change and scaling up the organisation significantly while fostering a culture of innovation, delivery, trust, and accountability. With my teams I developed an engineering culture that helped to ensure reliability, performance, and security of the platform, which serves as an example to the organisation. This role entails budget responsibility for the overall company-wide cloud budget.

As Engineering Director of Developer Enablement, I was responsible for the developer-facing side of the Backbase product designed to empower Backbase implementation partners and enhance their overall implementation. These included the various SDKs, APIs, our technical documentation web site, and the Backbase Sandbox application. I was responsible for building and managing high-performing software development teams.

Backbase delivers enterprise software for financial institutions to accelerate their digital transformation and deliver superior online- and mobile customer experiences. As a development & delivery manager, I managed 30-50 engineers, and my focus was on people, process and delivery. When I joined Backbase, I was tasked with the goal to launch our first cloud-native product and ensure a successful go-live with a launching customer.

eVision Software (now Enablon) is a world leader in operational safety management software, delivering Permit-to-work solutions worldwide for oil & gas installations. As a technical product manager, I was responsible for strategically critical innovative products, primarily mobile applications for use in hazardous environments and Control-of-Work Business Intelligence solutions. I managed three dedicated development teams. As the Product manager, I was both the customer-facing person and accountable for the team delivery and implementation. Additionally, I regularly worked as a solution architect where to ensure that the technical design was in place to address (non-) functional concerns and to ensure a secure, performant, robust and scalable enterprise solution.

At Spil Games, I was responsible for the Payments team, providing a customer-facing in-game payments system, and the Services team which providing all platform features. Additionally, I’ve built the (API) Game Platform team which was responsible for creating powerful APIs and SDKs to support the community of our game development partners.

From 1996 to 2011, I worked in a variety of software engineering roles in different companies, on different B2B and B2C applications, ranging from intranet applications to medical administrative healthcare software to realtime Java game engines. I’ve worked with a variety of technologies and programming languages, including Java, Perl, PHP, .net, PL/SQL, Javascript, bash, HTML, CSS, MySQL, Oracle, Apache, nginx, postfix, dovecot and many more. The one-and-a-half decade I spent working as a software engineer continues to provide me with an invaluable technical background that benefits me in my daily work to this day.