Jan Ehrhardt

Principal Engineer with 19+ years of software development experience and 10+ years in technical leadership roles. Currently leading technical strategy across 5 engineering teams, building distributed systems at scale. I truly believe that technical leadership requires hands-on coding. My leadership approach is deeply rooted in lean principles - eliminating waste, reducing inconsistency, and preventing overburden across both technical systems and team processes. I focus on fostering continuous improvement through kaizen, helping teams identify bottlenecks and streamline their development workflows. This philosophy extends to how I mentor engineers, always seeking to remove obstacles that prevent them from doing their best work while building systems that scale efficiently without unnecessary complexity.I specialize in designing microservices architectures and event-driven systems that handle failure gracefully while maintaining high throughput. My experience spans building resilient distributed systems using Kotlin, Spring Boot, or Go, all running on AWS infrastructure managed through Terraform. Beyond my professional work, I'm passionate about emerging paradigms like local-first software and specification-driven development with coding agents, exploring how these approaches can revolutionize how we build applications.