Lena Schulz

Sample

VP of Engineering at Saffron Foods · Payments infrastructure · gRPC, Kafka

Saffron Foods
Zurich, Switzerland · CET (UTC+1)
14+ years experience
Sorbonne University
English, German, French
Messaging unavailable

Overview

VP of Engineering at Saffron Foods, focused on payments infrastructure. Shipped 26 launches on the payments platform team without a rollback. Before that: Santander and Booking.com. Most at home with gRPC and distributed systems. Bird-watcher and amateur naturalist.

Good reasons to reach out
  • Second opinions on gRPC decisions
  • Speaking or podcast invitations
Please don't message about
  • Unpaid work or spec projects
  • SEO and link-building offers

Replies between meetings, usually same day

Skills
distributed systemsPCI DSSgRPCKafka

Experience

  1. VP of Engineering
    May 2024 - Present
    Saffron Foods · 2 yr 5 mo · Full-time · Zurich, Switzerland
    • Wrote the PCI DSS service that now handles 48 million requests a day.
    • Reduced cloud spend on payments platform by 24% in two quarters.
    • Cut p99 latency on the payments platform services from 877ms to 120ms.
  2. Senior Backend Engineer
    Mar 2022 - May 2024
    Santander · 2 yr 2 mo · Full-time · Zurich, Switzerland
    • Reduced cloud spend on payments platform by 38% in two quarters.
  3. Director of Engineering
    Nov 2018 - Mar 2022
    Booking.com · 3 yr 4 mo · Full-time · Zurich, Switzerland
    • Shipped a rewrite that took build times from 40 minutes to under 2.
    • Took payment success rates from 93.3% to 96.2%.
  4. Backend Engineer
    Feb 2015 - Nov 2018
    Wise · 3 yr 9 mo · Full-time · Zurich, Switzerland
    • Shipped 16 launches on the payments platform team without a rollback.
    • Designed the reconciliation system that matches 1 million transactions a day.
  5. Senior Engineering Manager
    Jul 2012 - Feb 2015
    Bolt · 2 yr 7 mo · Full-time · Zurich, Switzerland
    • Reduced cloud spend on payments platform by 18% in two quarters.
    • Shipped a rewrite that took build times from 34 minutes to under 6.

Projects

Payments infrastructure benchmark
2026

Reproducible benchmarks comparing PCI DSS and distributed systems on real workloads.

Write-up: payments infrastructure in practice
2025

A long-form guide to payments infrastructure for people starting out.

References

No references yet.

Education

  1. Sorbonne University
    Licence, Computer Engineering
    1999 - 2002

Details

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