Senior software engineer specializing in Rust with strong experience in distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, DevOps, and event-driven architectures. University lecturer specializing in Rust programming, as well as an active open-source contributor and co-maintainer within the Rust ecosystem.

Professional Experience

Otto GmbH & Co. KGaA

Senior Software Developer · 2025/03 – Present

• Technical lead for the adoption of Rust at OTTO, including mentoring teams, supporting the first production Rust services, and establishing internal knowledge-sharing formats.
• Key contributor to OTTO’s cloud efficiency initiatives, focused on identifying and implementing measures to reduce infrastructure and operational costs across multiple services and platforms.
  • Drove the design and implementation of a company-wide initiative that reduced annual cloud data transfer costs by more than $500,000 through IPv6 and dual-stack networking strategies (technical blog post).
• Development of scalable distributed systems and micro-frontends with a strong focus on reliability, observability, and operational excellence, leveraging agentic engineering tools to improve development efficiency in agile cross-functional product teams.
• Mentoring and supporting dual-study students and apprentices.
  • Scientific and business supervision of the best bachelor’s thesis in the 2026 Applied Informatics cohort at NORDAKADEMIE on evaluating Rust design patterns in production systems (Public Thesis Repository).

Software Developer · 2022/03 – 2025/03

Junior Software Developer · 2021/03 – 2022/03

Dual Study Program in Business Informatics · 2017/08 – 2021/03

NORDAKADEMIE University of Applied Sciences

Adjunct Lecturer & Academic Examiner · 2025/10 – Present

• Lecturer for module A215 Cloud and Distributed Systems (45 semester hours, Q3 2027)
• Co-lecturer for the seminar Introduction to the Rust Programming Language
• Academic examiner and evaluator for academic research papers and bachelor's theses

Education

NORDAKADEMIE University of Applied Sciences

Bachelor of Science (Business Informatics), Final Grade: 1.7 · 2017/10 – 2021/03

Skills

• Programming Languages: Rust, Python, Kotlin, Java
• Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, GitHub Actions
• Messaging: Kafka, SNS/SQS
• Databases: PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, MongoDB, SQLite
• Architecture: Event Sourcing, Domain-Driven Design, Micro-frontends, REST APIs, distributed systems, event-driven architectures
• Practices: TDD, Pair Programming, Scrum, Kanban, Disaster Recovery
• Frontend: TypeScript, JavaScript, HTML, CSS
• Languages: German (Native), English (Full professional proficiency), Mandarin (Currently learning, A1.2)

Projects & Research

Academic Publication

• Leon Heuer, Falk Woldmann Lu, Jan Haase (2026). Functional State Machines in Rust: Typestate and Newtype Patterns (Experience Report). In: Proceedings of the 4th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Functional Software Architecture (FUNARCH 2026). DOI: 10.1145/3830438.3830958.

Selected Writing

• Falk Woldmann, Nico Schmidt, René Hottendorf (2026). Rewriting OTTO in Rust: oxidizing our codebase, one service at a time. OTTO Techblog.
• COST, Falk Woldmann (2024). How we used a simple trick to save USD 500,000 in data transfer costs. OTTO Techblog.
• Falk Woldmann, Kay Hannay (2024). Recap of the EuroRust 2023 conference in Brussels. OTTO Techblog.

Open Source

• Co-maintainer of httpmock, a widely used HTTP mocking library for Rust with more than 600 GitHub stars and 20+ million downloads on crates.io.
• Contributions to various Rust ecosystem projects, including Tokio, Axum, Tower, Reqwest, and AWS SDK & Lambda libraries.

Conferences & Community

• Speaker at bit summit (2026) with Maximillian Hausner: Talk on NAT Gateway to Net Savings: How OTTO saved $500k with IPv6.
• Speaker at CloudLand Conference (2026) with Jan Maximillian Hausner: Talk on NAT Gateway to Net Savings: How OTTO saved $500k with IPv6.
• Speaker at AWS User Group Hamburg (2025/05): Talk on How to use a simple trick to save USD 500,000 in data transfer costs with Michael Weidemann & Frederic Düwer, hosted at OTTO.
• Organizer of AWS User Group Hamburg meetups.
• Organizer of Rust User Group Hamburg meetups.