Resume
Senior Clojure developer · Hannover, Germany · remote (CET) · open to contract work and permanent roles
Benjamin.Schwerdtner@gmail.com, LinkedIn, GitHub, Personal website, Work With Benjamin
Living and breathing Clojure and functional programming, with a focus on Clojure, Linux and Emacs and functional, data-oriented programming. In the industry since 2018: full-stack web applications, frontend, backend, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, language tooling and open-source contributions.
I care about understanding the problem, iterating on the ideas, delivering, and communicating clearly as a programmer.
Experience
2025–present: Senior Clojure developer at United Signals
Flowniq: PDFs become digital workflows with approvals, signatures and API integration, used by banks. Clojure, ClojureScript, Datomic, Malli, Reitit, pair programming.
- Self-started usability features that increased user satisfaction:
- the group element.
- the AI chat in the form designer: users describe what they want, and the assistant builds and changes forms, logic and integrations directly. It takes the platform's usability to a new level.
- Arabic and right-to-left support across forms, designer, emails and PDFs; the first version within a few days.
- Performance improvements: flow loading after a deploy 75–80% faster, final submit with PDFs ~85% faster (1.1 s → 0.14 s), renaming in the designer from 1.8 s to under 0.25 s.
- Profiled frontend performance; theming.
- Integrated third-party APIs and built a schema shared by frontend and backend.
2023–2024: Contract work
- Clojure contract for United Signals, which led to the senior role.
- Nov 2023–Sep 2024: mysentient.ai / AtheneGPT.
- Nov–Dec 2023: LLM execution stack with CUDA and PyTorch, profiling and debugging transformer inference frameworks.
- Jan–Sep 2024: frontend with React, Vite, CSS + Tailwind.
2018–2023: Programmer at Singularity Group
Mobile games, blockchain, NFTs.
- Unity HotReload: worked on the Roslyn / Cecil implementation and made it run on Linux and macOS, which took a deep working knowledge of Unix and .NET.
- A top-grossing mobile game, Athene AI Heroes (formerly Mobile Minigames), in C# / .NET / Unity: cross-functional team of 25+ people, 3+ million downloads. Mobile client development. Mentored junior team members.
- Built code linters, code-quality pipelines (Roslyn) and a Rider plugin (Kotlin, Clojure).
- Built GitLab CI pipelines for Mobile Minigames and HotReload. Docker, Linux containers and servers, configuration as code, observability.
- AWS cloud and microservices: IAM, S3, Lambda, DynamoDB; Go, TypeScript, GraphQL. Analytics on AWS Redshift (SQL), 6 months.
2013–2018: Studies
- 2014–2018: Biology at the University of Hohenheim (discontinued)
- 2013–2014: Cognitive science at the University of Osnabrück (discontinued)
Strong base knowledge of all major topics of biology and neuroscience: molecular biology lab experience, physiology, neurophysiology, biochemistry, zoology, botany, evolutionary biology.
Skills
- Clojure, 5 years: Datomic Cloud, Datalog, Reitit, Malli, spec, re-frame, Reagent, core.logic, test.check, kaocha, transducers. Domain modeling, property-based testing, REPL-driven development (with contributions to CIDER and the Babashka nREPL).
- Lisp, 8+ years (since 2018): Emacs Lisp, Scheme, Common Lisp. Interactive programming, metaprogramming, bottom-up design.
- Frontend, expert: ClojureScript, JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Reagent, Re-frame, Scittle, HTML, CSS. Performance, accessibility, privacy.
- Databases: Datomic (3 years), PostgreSQL, Redis, DynamoDB, AWS Redshift.
- Infrastructure: Linux, AWS, Docker, GitLab and GitHub CI, .NET.
- Tools: Emacs, vim, shell, Bash, Babashka, git, Rider, Jira. My working knowledge of Emacs and Unix shows in my content and screencasts.
- Languages: German (native), English (fluent), Latin (rudimentary).
Open source and projects
- Worked with Borkdude on clj-kondo, nbb and babashka nREPL. CIDER contributions, WorksHub leona and flow-bot fixes, bug reports.
- A Vector-Symbolic Clojure: a Clojure in which every value is one high-dimensional vector (code). All my HDC work: HDC Overview.
- openai-api.el (Emacs package), a getting-started Emacs config, a Lisp dialect where the code is JSON, binaural beats (Scittle), Flip Coin.
- My website: Clojure and Emacs blog posts, screencasts, software art. Built from Emacs denote notes, with Babashka for the feed.
Interests
Research engineering: how the brain works, cognitive architectures, cybernetics, software synthesis, neurosymbolic AI, evolutionary and biologically principled algorithms, self-organisation, a-life, neuronal codes, hyperdimensional computing, programming in superposition, relational programming.
Self-taught from textbooks, on a never-ending journey of improving my craft: Rich Hickey, Eric Normand, SICP, Paul Graham, Bret Victor.
Volunteering
Organized with a team of volunteers to fight poverty. See Track Record.
Recommendations
Ben was essential part of the team with his work on front end of the game written in Unity. He also developed many extras from which other developers benefited like build tools, testing tools and editor plugins.
Ben helped newcomers to the project to set-up their developer environments and helped with their coding tasks. Ben was well liked by whole developer team for his awesome skills and curious nature. I would love to work with Ben.
Milan, former colleague on Mobile Minigames, now Athene AI Heroes (LinkedIn Recommendations)
Generated by Claude on Benjamin Schwerdtner's behalf.