Clemens Kofler

Clemens Kofler

Experienced software architect/engineer and entrepreneur based in Munich, Germany.

About Me

I'm a seasoned software architect/engineer and entrepreneur with more than 15 years of professional experience in building solutions for various startups (including my own) as well as small and mid-sized companies.

I'm also passionate about open source contributions. I've authored and contributed to multiple open source projects since 2007, including the Ruby on Rails framework and the Ruby internationalization (i18n) package.

Experience

Principal Engineer

DataGuard

September 2020 – Present

  • Principal Engineer (February 2024 – Present)
  • Director of Engineering (August 2023 – February 2024)
  • Engineering Manager (August 2022 – August 2023)
  • Staff Software Engineer (March 2022 – August 2022)
  • Senior Software Engineer (September 2020 – February 2022)
I joined privacy and legal tech company DataGuard in September 2020. In my current role as a Principal Engineer, I contribute and/or lead some of the most critical projects and initiatives across the whole company.

Tech Co-Founder

Temedica

June 2016 – Present

  • Tech Co-Founder (June 2016 – Present; no operational involvement since September 2020)
  • Chief Technology Officer & Managing Director (June 2016 – May 2020)
After more than a decade of freelancing as a consultant and developer, I co-founded my own startup Temedica with the goal of developing sustainable solutions for the healthcare industry and served as its CTO and Managing Director until May 2020. My co-founder Gloria and I grew the company from 2 people in a tiny 20sqm office to ~40 people in 4 years, raising more than 17 million Euros from reputable investors, including MIG Funds and Santo Venture Capital.

Consulting & Development

Freelancer

August 2005 – March 2017

I did consulting and development for various startups and small to mid-sized companies for more than 10 years. A list of the most relevant projects and clients can be found below.

Freelancing Projects/Clients

Ablinger.Garber

May 2014 – March 2017

Ablinger.Garber is a publishing house and printer. I’ve built their custom CRM software including account, contact and campaign management.
ELSNER Pflege

September 2013 – March 2017

ELSNER Pflege is an agency brokering 24h nurses. I’ve built their internal management software to help them manage their clients and nurses including contract management, disposition and accounting.
CodeShip

May 2014 – June 2016

CodeShip is a continuous integration & delivery platform. I supported them from May 2014 until June 2016 on their way to their Series A fundraising round mainly with backend development.
The Mobility House

2014 – 2016

The Mobility House (TMH) is a provider of e-mobility solutions. I supported TMH as a lead architect and developer on 2 large-scale projects from 2014 until 2016.
bergshop.com

2012 – 2014

bergshop.com is an online shop selling gear for climbing, mountaineering and other outdoor equipment. The shop is operated by a friend of mine and I built their shop based on the Spree Commerce platform, authoring 3 Spree plugins (coupon campaigns, PayPal integration, Wirecard integration) along the way.
Pernod Ricard Austria

2013 – 2014

Pernod Ricard is the world's 2nd largest spirits producer. I created (concept & development) their service barkarte.at (defunct) in 2014/15, which was a web tool to create and order heavily customizable restaurant & bar menus (including an Adobe InDesign export API). I was also responsible for overall project management and coordination with stakeholders (creative agency, printers etc.).
Shore

November 2013 – March 2014

Shore is a business management suite. I supported them in their early days (when they were still called Termine24) from November 2013 until March 2014 with backend and frontend development.
fingerbook

March 2012 – December 2013

fingerbook is an online photobooklet creator; I developed all the backend and significant parts of the frontend for fingerbook and helped with concept creation and UX from early 2012 until end of 2013.
MeAndYou

Winter 2011/12

MeAndYou was an online dating platform. I did backend development for them, including a Redis-based profile matching algorithm, in winter 2011/12.
Tito

Summer 2011

Tito is an event management & ticket sales platform; I contributed to early development of Tito in Summer of 2011.
Noko (Freckle) / Charm

2010/11

Noko is a time tracking app and Charm was a customer support platform. I contributed some backend work to Slash7's time tracking app Noko (then Freckle) and built the backend for the initial prototype of their discontinued Customer Support platform Charm in 2010 and 2011.
Avarteq

2010 – 2014

Avarteq hired me as a consultant and developer for various projects as well as a coach and mentor for their junior developers between 2010 and 2014.
betterplace.org

January 2010

I helped betterplace.org in their challenges to upgrade from Rails 2.1 to 2.3 with a particular focus on getting i18n running properly.
upstream

2010 – 2011

I helped my friends of upstream out with a couple of projects, including the reading platform PaperC and Twilio competitor Jamii.
COMMUNITOR

2007 – 2014

Between 2007 and 2014, I was hired repeatedly by COMMUNITOR as a consultant and developer on various projects, including projects for the Austrian Ministry of Education, beauty.at and auto-motor.at, and contributed concepts and development for their proprietary CMS SiteWare.
BESTgroup / advaBEST

2008 – 2010

I was hired as a developer to work on the adva-cms content management platform (open source) and the advaBEST business platform (proprietary).
Power4Youth.eu

2006 – 2007

Power4Youth was a project sponsored by SOS Children's Villages to create a community for children brought up in institutions. I built the whole platform start to finish.

Open Source & Blogging

adva-cms
I was a core developer of the adva-cms content management platform. adva-cms was one of the first larger projects that used Rails Engines and the Cells library (now part of Trailblazer).
Steam
In 2009, Steam was one of the first tools in the Ruby ecosystem to allow for (headless) JavaScript-enabled testing. I co-authored the tool together with Sven Fuchs.
Ruby i18n
I was a core contributor to the Ruby i18n package. Among other things, I contributed the cascading backend.
delocalize
Library for parsing localized dates/times and numbers into internationalized formats.
Others
There's a handful of other things I've written and experimented with over the years. Check out my GitHub profile for a more exhaustive list.

Education

Diploma / Mag. (FH) in Management & Applied Informatics

2004 – 2008

I studied Management & Applied Informatics at Management Center Innsbruck (with a semester abroad at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia) and graduated with a diploma in 2008. My thesis analyzed usability concerns for websites with heterogeneous target groups.

Skills

Languages & Frameworks
Ruby on Rails, Vue.js, JavaScript (ES6+) and some solid basics in Laravel, React and React Native. I’ve also recently started exploring TypeScript in more depth. (And yes, of course I can do jQuery, too.)
Data Stores
PostgreSQL, Redis, MySQL, MongoDB
Other
Test Driven Development, Rapid Prototyping
Puppet & Chef (basics)
Typing speed 80-90 WPM (English, prose)

Imprint / Impressum

Clemens Kofler
Freisinger Str. 4
85764 Oberschleissheim
Germany

Email: mail@clemenskofler.com