Kris Welke — Director of Software Engineering

About me

Leader with a coder's mindset

I'm a Leader, Manager, and Architect of Software Engineering with close to two decades of hands-on and leadership experience. I build and mentor development teams, set technical strategy, and still love rolling up my sleeves when the problem demands it.

My career has spanned complex development technologies and distributed data systems, and most recently, the design of AI-powered architectures. I believe great engineering culture is the multiplier behind every great product.

I actively explore AI world, autonomous agents, and the rapidly evolving landscape of AI tooling — both for the craft and the sheer curiosity of it. I drive the adoption of AI-powered architectures and modern engineering practices, agentic systems (harnesses) and workflows.

At the senior leadership level, I build trust through structured 1:1s and decisive, evidence-based calls — owning org design, hiring, and budget/FinOps decisions across distributed, cross-border teams.

~20

Years in industry

Daily passion

∞

Lines of code

0→1

Team builder

Expertise

Practical skills

Leadership

Engineering management Team building (0→1) & turnaround Mentorship Technical strategy Ownership Cross-site org design (EU/US/India) Technical hiring & interviewing Data-driven decision making

AI / ML

LLMs Autonomous agents RAG systems NER Model fine-tuning Prompt/Context/Loop/Graph engineering

Architecture

AI system design Spec-driven architecture Domain-driven architecture Event-driven architecture Modular monolith Distributed systems Microservices Scalability Reliability

Big Data

Apache Iceberg Apache Spark Databricks Large-scale data pipelines Data Lakes Cloud technologies (MS Azure, AWS)

Tech Stack

Java/Spring Python Go C# .NET TypeScript MySQL PostgreSQL Jenkins GitLab Bitbucket Docker Ansible Kubernetes Terraform NGiNX NodeJS FastAPI Redis RabbitMQ Vaadin Nexus and many more

Integrations

Veeva Salesforce Snowflake Auth0 (OAuth2/OIDC, SSO) Bamboo CI/CD ERP systems API-led connectivity

Practices

Technical road mapping Agile framework (SAFe) System architecture planning SDLC STAR & RICE frameworks Devops/SRE Cross-functional collaboration Hiring Vendor & contractor management

Career

Experience timeline

2022 – Present

Director of Software Engineering (Data division)

AnjuSoftware

Lead cross-functional engineering teams across multiple product lines, directly managing 12 leads and managers who oversee ~44 engineers across 9 teams in Belgium, the EU, the US, the Middle East, and India.

Own the technical bar for hiring, personally running the technical interview round for every hire on my teams rather than only signing off.

Define and communicate a technical vision aligned with business strategy, working with product and executive stakeholders to turn business goals into engineering roadmaps.

Take end-to-end responsibility for delivery, decisions, roadmaps, software architecture, and stakeholder communication, and act as technical owner of a B2B/SaaS product line.

Translate product priorities into staffing and delivery plans across squads, keeping progress, dependencies, and risks visible while balancing feature work against compliance, technical debt, and stability.

Design system architecture for maintainability, reliability, performance, and scalability, and manage scaling up and down across systems, infrastructure, FinOps, resources, and budgets.

Drive adoption of AI-powered architectures, agentic systems and workflows, and modern engineering practices, raising standards for secure, reliable services through automation, observability, resilience, and security-first design.

Lead organizational transformations by assessing first (structured 1:1s with every engineer and lead), then sequencing change through systems and processes before people, with redeployment before release.

Build alignment through open, evidence-based technical debate; when consensus stalls after genuine discussion, make the call, document it, and own the outcome.

Coach and mentor engineers and leads through clear goals, regular feedback, and growth opportunities, fostering a culture of trust, ownership, and sustainable performance.

Partner with product, architecture, and engineering leads to align expectations, resolve delivery issues, and bring a capacity and delivery view into roadmap planning.

2014 – 2022

Development Manager / Team Leader / Senior Engineer

Ministry of Education, MDCPartners, AnjuSoftware

Designed and delivered large-scale distributed systems using Java, Python, Go, .NET, and TypeScript. Led engineering teams of 30+ engineers, owning hiring, mentorship, and technical direction. Built integrations with Veeva, Salesforce, Snowflake, Auth0/SSO, and ERP systems, plus Bamboo CI/CD pipelines. Sourced and managed a blended workforce of permanent hires, long-term contractors, and project-based specialists across multiple markets.

Early career

Software Engineer

Full Development, HTML, TypeScript, PHP, JAVA, Python, ActionScript, MySQL

Built web applications and data pipelines. Developed deep programming expertise across the stack that continues to inform technical leadership decisions today.

Passion

AI — every single day

🧠

Large Language Models

Deep interest in LLM internals, prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and building spec-driven production-grade LLM-powered applications.

🤖

Autonomous Agents

Designing and experimenting with agentic harness workflows, tool-use, multi-agent systems, and orchestration frameworks.

⚙️

AI Architecture

Bringing an architect's eye to AI system design — reliability, cost, latency, observability, and responsible deployment.

🔬

Hands-on Research

Coding experiments with the latest models and frameworks daily — because the best way to understand AI is to build with it.

🔥

Coding ≠ engineering

AI can code, but not engineer — at least, not yet. Be smart. Be original.

⚡

AI is not just LLM

Building RAG systems, fine-tuning models, NER in practice, the maths behind the scenes.

Nothing is impossible...