Rafael Roman

Co-founded Upgrid in January 2025 and wrote the first commit. As CTO I own architecture and delivery, and take product and go-to-market when clarity is the bottleneck rather than code.

Built: SDAT metering ingestion, fifteen-minute consumption allocation, a billing engine with Swiss QR-bill PDF generation, Bexio accounting sync, and operator workflows for community formation and exception handling. One codebase serves consumers, full operator accounts, co-brand partners (municipalities and installers who bring members while Upgrid runs the communities), and affiliates, each on different permissions.

Architecture: seven apps and ~70 workspace packages in a monorepo on a shared Postgres schema with row-level-security multi-tenancy. Sized for a small team, and the opposite call from the roughly 200-service estate I came from at N26.

Scale today: 2k+ members, 250+ communities, 150+ municipalities.

The company story is in Building Upgrid. The stack tour — apps, metering, allocation, billing, delivery — is in Engineering at Upgrid. How often that stack ships is in Shipping at Upgrid.

Principal Engineer on Personio’s platform organization, working across teams rather than inside one: technical direction for the core services other product teams build on, and the architecture calls that span them.

Ten months in Barcelona, during which I gave the staff-engineering talk at DevBCN, WeAreDevelopers and JavaCro.

Four years shaping the technical core of Europe’s most-funded neobank. As Principal Engineer: delivered the architectural vision for payments (bank and peer-to-peer transfers) and customer acquisition; led the overhaul of financial crime prevention — replaced a static rule engine spread across microservices with a real-time Apache Flink streaming system in under six months. Before that, as Tech Lead: architected the fee charging platform that became standard infrastructure embedded in N26’s ledger APIs across Europe.