Welcome to the IOTA Foundation – February 2022

Branko Bosnic

Branko joins the IOTA Foundation as a Full Stack Engineer. In this role, he will expand the capabilities of our client libraries team with a focus on improving the usability of the framework and tooling. Branko lives in Split, Croatia, and has a master’s degree in Information Technology. He has a background in the telecommunication industry and brings more than eight years of experience in web technologies and digital solutions. He joins the IOTA Foundation because he wants to become a valued member within this community-oriented ecosystem and to be an advocate for IOTA to the outside world ensuring long-term success for the project.

I have been following the IOTA project since 2017, mostly from an investment standpoint, but also looked into the open-source code and saw its strong community. Over the years I have gotten to know the project really well, so when an opportunity came up to join the Foundation, it was a no-brainer. I am excited to be a part of the IOTA Foundation and for the opportunity to contribute and continue to learn and grow by being a part of the team with brilliant engineers working on bleeding edge technology.

Jacek Roszkowiak

Jacek joins the IOTA Foundation as a Junior Developer in the Market Adoption team. It is his first developer role and he is currently working on the City Exchange project. Jacek lives in Berlin and has graduated from a programming bootcamp at the SPICED Academy. Previously, he worked at IBM as a Project Manager but changed his career direction to focus more on other strengths and interests. In joining the IF, he wants to become a part of an open-source, experienced team and use the opportunity to grow as a Full Stack Developer.

I’m a sociologist by education and as such, I have always enjoyed observing how technological progress shapes our societies. Now, I’m very excited to start my software developer career at the IOTA Foundation and contribute to this amazing project. The application of IOTA's protocol has incredible potential to shape the world in the near future.

Susanne Krone

Susanne joins the IOTA Foundation as a Media Producer in the Communications team. In her role, she will focus mostly on the Assembly network. Previously, she worked as a radio journalist and storyteller and will complement the team with her experiences in brand-building and communications in the crypto industry. Susanne lives in the Rhein-Main region, Germany, and holds a degree in Journalism.

After discovering IOTA in 2017, I was intrigued by its different approach to traditional blockchains. Throughout the years one impression kept re-confirming: IOTA’s ambitions and vision are not merely different for the sake of it. Instead, they are to innovate, improve and compliment a technology that changes the way the world connects and exchanges information and value. Being a firm believer that outstanding communication is the pulse of every successful project, I feel honoured to join the foundation in my role and to support the Communications team on the exciting new endeavour called Assembly.

Rabin Muhammed

Rabin joins the IOTA Foundation as a Senior Embedded Engineer in the Engineering team. In this role, he will focus on the IOTA libraries for embedded devices. Rabin lives in Kerala, India, and has over seven years of experience in IoT product development, especially in embedded firmware development. He has a bachelor's degree in Applied Electronics and Instrumentation. He joins the IOTA Foundation because he is interested in working in an open-source, community-oriented team with a mission to create big waves in the IoT space.

Over the past few years it was really interesting to develop devices that talk to each other and to centralized systems. It is now even more fascinating to think of devices talking over a decentralized network. Centralized systems and emergence of a lot of proprietary IoT protocols has always been a concern of IoT scalability and interoperability. I believe IOTA can make a difference here. Imagine a refrigerator that places purchase requests when it is low on milk and also autonomously pays for it, cool huh? Being part of a team building such an ecosystem is a great opportunity for me to work on multiple embedded platforms, to learn from the best and grow as part of the foundation.

Jochen Görtler

Jochen joins the IOTA Foundation as a Senior Software Engineer (Rust) in the Engineering team. He is based in Walldorf, Germany, and has finished his Ph.D. focused on quantitative methods for uncertainty visualization at the University of Konstanz. He has experience in multiple fields spanning visualizations, computer graphics and AI. During his Ph.D., he was a visiting researcher at the University of Utah and explored methods for understanding machine learning performance at Apple. Jochen has also published multiple academic papers (the latest will be presented at CHI 2022). Jochen joins the IOTA Foundation because he is interested in writing performant code for distributed and decentralized systems. He is expanding our Rust capabilities by joining the Bee team.

Mahammad Rahmanov

Mahammad joins the IOTA Foundation as a Junior Developer with a focus on frontend development. He will assist in integrating the front and backend of the developed solutions. Mahammad lives in Goettingen, Germany, and has recently graduated with a master’s degree in Applied Computer Science. While studying he worked as a frontend developer and implemented software development best practices.

Distributed Ledgers Technologies were always in the area of my interest. The mission of providing free, secure, and decentralized digital work is one of the vital reasons that attracted my attention. I am very excited to be a part of such a great team at the IOTA Foundation. While working at IOTA I will try to contribute as much as possible to the company with all the experience and knowledge gained during the years.

Nicole O'Brien

Nicole joins the IOTA Foundation as a Software Engineer in the Engineering department. In this role, she will focus on the Firefly application and the development process within the Firefly team. Nicole lives in London, UK, and has a master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Nottingham, England. Prior to joining the Foundation, Nicole has three years of experience as a technology consultant on business/digital transformations and frontend applications. She worked for both private financial companies and more recently public health and defense organizations.

After following the IOTA Foundation since 2017 and believing in its potential, I am absolutely thrilled to be able to contribute to the discussions and development of a technology I know will be able to achieve so much. I will mainly be focussed on the development of the Firefly application, but I look forward to using my previous consulting experience to help implement efficient processes for open-source development as the team continues to grow.

Michele Mastrogiovanni

Michele joins the IOTA Foundation as a Senior Software Engineer in the Market Adoption team. In this role, he will focus on various publicly and privately-funded projects to develop best practices, tools, and processes for creating reliable, scalable, and secure services. Michele lives in Rome, Italy, and spent last year working as CTO in Stonize, a FinTech startup that aims to create an accessible and transparent (blockchain-based) securitization platform.

He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science working on wireless sensor networks (the core of the modern Internet of Things) and then moved to “Engineering S.p.A” (an Italian system integrator) for 10 years. Here he was part of many projects in the telecommunication, health, finance, and automotive industries as a developer and team leader. He also worked in Expedia and in Konica Minolta in the Architecture Prototype team. He decided to join the IOTA Foundation because of its community-oriented mission, open-source software development, and growing ecosystem. As IOTA’s technologies are starting to be broadly adopted, Michele aims to help the foundation solve scalability, reliability, and security problems and promote adoption.

After a beautiful experience in distributed systems and cloud native architectures, I entered the blockchain world working on Algorand and Ethereum. This prepared me for the biggest challenge of all time: a feeless distributed ledger. At the beginning, I thought that IOTA was a kind of Chimera: a mythological being. I remembered when I asked myself: how can you solve consensus AND incentivize by using a blockchain? IOTA is the answer! I’m proud to be part of this adventure and to bring this wonderful technology closer to real people every day.

We are very happy to officially announce that Branko Bosnic, Jacek Roszkowiak, Susanne Krone, Jochen Görtler, Mahammad Rahmanov, Nicole O'Brien, Rabin Muhammed, and Michele Mastrogiovanni have joined the IOTA Foundation. Give them all a very warm welcome!

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