Richard Fussenegger
Principal Software Engineer at Smartly
Berlin, Germany
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRichard Fussenegger is a Principal Software Engineer based in Berlin with 14 years of experience building high-availability, performant distributed systems and developer productivity platforms. He combines deep systems and security expertise—especially around Kafka, Protobuf, gRPC, and JVM tooling—with hands-on work across cloud native infrastructure and CI/CD at companies like HelloFresh, N26, and AWS. A persistent pragmatist, he has driven migrations to Kafka/MSK, implemented policy-based access control and automated compatibility checks, and created microservice chassis that eliminate boilerplate across organizations. Richard is an active open-source contributor (notably improving validation performance in bufbuild/protoc-gen-validate and contributing to PHP tooling and Actions runner projects), reflecting his commitment to free knowledge and reproducible engineering. Outside work he explores compiler construction and programming language theory, and he brings that theoretical curiosity into practical engineering decisions. Colleagues describe him as a hands-on architect who writes code, mentors teams, and quietly improves developer experience at scale.
14 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
Electrical Engineer, Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Electrical Engineer, Electrical and Electronics Engineering at Landesberufsschule Bregenz 2Master of Science (MSc), Computer Software Engineering, Master of Science (MSc), Computer Software Engineering at Fachhochschule SalzburgMatriculation (Matura), German • English • Mathematics • Computer Science • Art & Design, Matriculation (Matura), German • English • Mathematics • Computer Science • Art & Design at Volkshochschule BregenzBachelor of Science (BSc), Computer Software Engineering, Bachelor of Science (BSc), Computer Software Engineering at FH Joanneum—, Electrical and Electronics Engineering, —, Electrical and Electronics Engineering at Höhere Technische Bundeslehr- und Versuchsanstalt Bregenz
German, English
Stackoverflow
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208answers
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Github Skills (55)
dependency-manager10
string-validation10
kubernetes10
github-ci10
docker10
scripting10
protocol-buffers10
bash10
proxy10
email-validation10
dockers10
java10
cicd10
ubuntu10
psr-710
Programming languages (22)
Github contributions (5)
bufbuild/protoc-gen-validate
Jun 2019 - Oct 2022
Protocol Buffer Validation - Being replaced by github.com/bufbuild/protovalidate
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 commits, 6 PRs, 24 comments in 3 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Richard made significant contributions to Java-based validation within the repository. Their work focused on improving the accuracy and performance of string validation functions, including length, email, and UUID validation. The user refactored existing code, replaced dependencies, and implemented optimizations, specifically by changing regular expressions to finite state machines for UUID validation and replacing dependency imports. These changes aimed to improve efficiency and performance of the validation processes.
protocol-bufferspolyglotvalidationprotobufprotoc-plugin
actions/actions-runner-controller
Mar 2022 - Nov 2022
Kubernetes controller for GitHub Actions self-hosted runners
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:13 reviews, 7 commits, 7 PRs in 7 months
Contributions summary:Richard's contributions center on improving the build and operational aspects of the actions-runner-controller. Their work includes modifying the `entrypoint.sh` script to copy dotfiles and load environment variables, and removing runner registration logic. They also significantly overhauled the `startup.sh` script, adding error handling and improving overall robustness. Furthermore, the user added a setting to keep `DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive` which improved the functionality for users of the image.
controllerhostedrunnersoperatorself-hosted-actions
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