Ólafur Guðmundsson
Co-Founder & CEO at KLAK - Venture Mentoring Service
Seltjarnarnesbær, Iceland
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolÓlafur Guðmundsson is a product-driven engineer and serial founder with 16 years of experience building and scaling high-performance engineering teams and B2B platforms. As co-founder and former CTO of Bókun (acquired by Tripadvisor) and now CEO of Medalia, he blends hands-on backend engineering with strategic leadership to grow products into global markets. He helped scale Bókun to serve customers across 170 countries and later led engineering at Tripadvisor, demonstrating expertise in distributed systems, high-load architectures, and operational scaling. An active contributor to open-source Java tooling, his work on the Morphia MongoDB mapper shows deep familiarity with data modeling, references and polymorphic mapping. Based in Iceland, he mentors startups through KLAK and brings a pragmatic, product-first mindset that couples technical craftsmanship with measurable business outcomes.
16 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
Computer Engineering, Computer Engineering at Háskóli ÍslandsMenntaskólinn í ReykjavíkTechnical University of Denmark
Icelandic, English, Danish
Stackoverflow
121reputation
3kreached
4answers
4questions
Github Skills (18)
annotations10
data-modeling10
java10
mongodb-database10
annotation-processing10
javas10
odm10
mongodb10
elasticsearch6
oauth6
single-sign-on6
akka6
groovy6
security6
webservice6
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
MorphiaOrg/morphia
Jan 2010 - Jun 2010
MongoDB object-document mapper in Java based on https://github.com/mongodb/mongo-java-driver
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:30 commits in 5 months
Contributions summary:Ólafur primarily contributed to the core logic of the Morphia library, a MongoDB object-document mapper for Java. Their work involved implementing new features and modifying existing ones within the `Mapper` class, including adding support for new data types and annotations like `@Polymorphic`. The user also addressed bugs and improved the DAO (Data Access Object) functionality, making the library more robust and flexible. Several commits focus on improving the handling of references and embedded objects within the mapping process.
javamongo-java-drivermongodbkotlinodm
Bokun/api-docs
Mar 2016 - Jul 2019
Documentation for the Bokun API in Open API format (previously swagger).
Contributions:32 commits, 44 pushes, 2 branches in 3 years 3 months
openapiswagger
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.