Hi, I am David

Senior Backend Engineer and Team Lead

I’m David Hamber, based in Berlin, Germany. This is my personal site that exists to present my professional experience, personal projects and present interests.

I have been working as a Team Lead in recent years, training mid level engineers into mature team roles, strengthening awareness of object oriented programming principles and better programming practices.

Working closely with DevOps teams, I have good experience with AWS systems using New Relic, Kubernetes, Docker, Jenkins and Gitlab CI pipelines.

Since graduating with a BSc in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, I have worked as a developer since 2004, where I started out in the UK as a multi role junior programmer for an Indie Games company specialising in Virtual Worlds and MMO games which included tools programming, web development, system administration and primarily, network server programming which I lead by the time of my departure.

In 2014 I moved to Berlin, Germany where I have primarily been working for various companies focusing on backend API engineering. Over the years I have become familiar with Docker, Kubernetes, Gitlab CI, Jenkins, Jira, AWS, and have had a strong hand in improving architectural design and refactoring legacy systems as well as working on payment systems that handle credit card, PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay transactions.

David Hamber

Curriculum Vitae

	Professional Experience


Jan 2024–Jul 2025	Lead Software Engineer (Senior+ Engineer), Hexaware Technologies, Berlin. Working on all services of Spark Network’s Zoosk dating platform. Instructing and guiding the PHP app support team and product engineering team. Maintaining and troubleshooting systems and adding new features and improvements. Processes: Scrum, GitLab and Jira.
Sep 2020–Dec 2023	Lead Software Engineer, Spark Networks SE, Berlin. Working on the Zoosk dating platform’s payment service as lead backend engineer. Focusing on credit card, iTunes, PayPal and Google Play payments. Leading refactoring to a Hexagon Design Architecture. Processes: Scrum, GitLab and Jira.
Jan 2020–July 2020	Software Entwickler (Senior), allmyhomes GmbH, Berlin. Development of REST API microservices in PHP for a company that is developing a platform that offers new build property developers branding and lead generation linked to brokers, agents with sales to end property purchasers. Working in a Domain Driven Design environment, migrating microservices from inter API calls to a CQRS Event Sourcing system. Tools and Frameworks: Laravel, PHPStan, PHP CodeSniffer, PHP Mess Detector, OpenAPI 2 (Swagger), Docker & Kubernetes. Processes: Agile / Scrum, Event Storming, Continuous Integration using git, GitLab and Jira.
Jan 2017–Jan 2019	Senior Software Engineer, Dunnhumby Germany GmbH (formerly Sociomantic Labs GmbH), Berlin. Development and maintenance of a RESTful / RPC API in PHP, serving web and mobile front-ends, within a company that offers real time bidding for online advertising solutions. Refactoring legacy code, adhering to SOLID OOP design principles, clearly identifying dependencies. Tools and Frameworks: Symfony & Laravel components, PHPStan, PHP CodeSniffer, PHP Mess Detector, GIT, GitHub, Nginx, MySQL.
Sep 2004–Mar 2014	Tools / Web / SysAdmin / Server Programmer / Lead Server Programmer, RedBedlam Ltd, Brighton, United Kingdom. Development of back-end game server code for contiguous persistent virtual world / MMO game. Featured dynamic server instances with interprocess communication and custom application layer protocol. Code refactoring, database optimising, troubleshooting bottlenecks, implementing new game mechanics, features and bug fixing. Administration and installation of on site and off site FreeBSD Unix and Debian Linux servers for RedBedlam’s game servers and web servers. Game server deployment and database back up scripting. Coding revised versions of the game websites. Integration of bulletin board system and customer facing wiki into game website. Integration of key customer web services to game systems. Creation of internal game content management system for controlling the flow of artwork assets and configuring the game object hierarchy and assets. Authoring scripts to manipulate game data and improve work flow. Languages: PHP, C#, Bash & MySQL. Technologies: Apache 2, MySQL,PostgreSQL, Mono, Java Tomcat, GIT repositories, company email services, Davical, MediaWiki.
	Education


Oct 2000-Jun 2003	BSc Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, University of Sussex, United Kingdom.
Sep 1994-Jun1997	BTEC National Diploma in Popular Music, BTEC First Diploma in Performing Arts, Chichester College of Arts, Science & Technology, United Kingdom.
Sep 1992-Jun 1994	BTEC National Diploma in Computer Studies, Eastbourne College of Arts & Technology, United Kingdom.
	Language Skills


English	Native Speaker	Comprehensive native level of understanding.
German	B1	Rating: Good.

Technologies

Companies and Projects

Hexaware

Hexaware took the role of managing ongoing development of Spark Network’s online dating platforms in 2024. During this time I continued to work on Spark’s Zoosk platform. I became the Team Lead for the product engineering and product support backend teams responsible for the whole Zoosk backend.

Spark networks

Spark Networks are an online dating business that own several well known online dating platforms including Christian Mingles, JDate, SilverSingles, EliteSingles, eDarling and Zoosk – the platform that I worked on. Zoosk was purchased by Spark around 2019. I started on the payment services team, dealing with payments using Google Play, Apple, PayPal and Adyen for credit cards. I eventually switching to a Team Lead position.

all my homes

allmyhomes provided marketing solutions for new-build real estate. It integrated marketing and sales activities on a software platform that gave the developer all the information and control over the project in order to make its sales. I worked on their event stream based REST API that was implemented with domain driven design.

Sociomantic

Sociomantic Labs was a German company, that specialized in the Real-time Bidding area for e-commerce. The company helped online stores to generate additional sales using an intellectual and scalable management system for media advertising. During my time with Sociomantic Labs I helped maintain and improve the API layer of their real-time bidding systems. Sociomantic was purchased and integrated into the British corporation Dunnhumby under the name Dunnhumby Germany.

RedBedlam

The following projects were during my time at RedBedlam 2004 – 2014

Roma Victor

In 2004, the year after leaving University I joined RedBedlam Ltd, a fledgling start up company. The company had an international team of people working from the United States, Spain, France, whilst the majority were based in Brighton within the United Kingdom.

Roma Victor was a particularly ambitious project. The game was a Roman Empire M.M.O.G. / Virtual World set in 180 A.D. within a 30km x 30km area along Hadrian’s Wall in Northern England.

After a few months of building a Content Management System for the game’s art assets and object hierarchy, I took a basic prototype of the server code and ported it from Visual Basic 6 to PHP. Over the period of development I dramatically improved upon the original design and implementation, adding new features, bug fixing and improving the base network code. The configuration consisted of three different kinds of software server: The main authentication and world manager server, the zone server instances, and a tray server for starting individual zone server instances.

dPals

Proving the versatility of the server code base that had been built whilst Roma Victor had been developed, it was simple to reduce the complexity for the back-end of dPals. dPals was a web based children’s virtual world, made by RedBedlam on behalf of History and Heraldry, a market leader in impulse-buy gifts and merchandise.

The first iteration of dPals used a Flash based front-end that connected to a branched version of the Roma Victor Zone Bubble code. The Roma Victor game code that sat on top of the underlying Zone Bubble base was stripped out and replaced a simpler and child friendly dPals game code. It was straight forward to alter the co-ordinate system from 3D to 2D to match dPals’ 2D Parallax scrolling world.

I was able to delegate responsibility for the Content Management System to a new programmer who was able to improve it under my direction.

Later in the project’s life the front end was rebuild in HTML5 and I was able to delegate the server code development to another new programmer who was brought in to support my role.

The Missing Ink

Learning from the experience of Roma Victor’s development, The Missing Ink followed not long after. The Missing Ink had a deliberately simple but polished 2D character artwork style set within a 3D world so that the content could be rapidly produced.

The Missing Ink was a “back to basics” M.M.O. game, that had classic M.M.O. style combat and leveling unlike Roma Victor’s twitch base combat and skill based system. It was intended to appeal to a wider market.

I had completely rewritten the server code ground up for this project. Substantial changes were required to allow for the fact that there would be a higher concentration of players within the same bubble zone area. As a result, the contiguous topography that was used in Roma Victor was replaced with a shard based system.

It was during the development of The Missing Ink that I shifted the code base away from PHP to Mono C#, matching the client side code development that was using Mono C# that was within the Unity 3D engine.

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