Joakim Platbarzdis
Programme lead and programme manager, technical project manager, interim CTO, product leader.
Stockholm · hello at mettle.se · mettle.se/joakim · LinkedIn
Available from Monday 2 November 2026, full or part time.
Profile
I lead technical projects and programmes in regulated businesses: plan, decisions and risks in writing, requirements traced to the work that meets them, and users trained before go-live.
I have worked with DORA from the text of the regulation: the register of information, impact analysis with recovery times, system classification, and traceability from obligation to work item.
I have been CTO and head of engineering: building the team, release and incident routines, security work, and a platform that can carry the next product.
I move and modernise systems across Google Cloud, AWS, Azure and servers on premises, and keep what depends on them running.
I have run product management for SaaS products from discovery and pricing to go-to-market, trained in the Pragmatic framework.
Since 2008 I have built and run a temperature-monitoring platform: field gateways, alarms that reach a person, and over 700 million reports to date.
I have led an e-archive tender and document digitalisation: what to keep, for how long, and where.
I use AI in delivery with read-only access, check every result myself and keep each statement traceable to its source. I also built MetLex, a search service over financial regulation for AI tools.
I lead IT programmes where suppliers, systems and regulation meet, and I build and run software myself. I was senior product manager for AI products at Episerver; since 2020 I have led change in finance, as CTO, head of engineering and programme lead. Since 2008 I have built and run the platform behind the TermoSense web features, for temperature monitoring in stores and research labs and depot heating for buses.
When someone brings me a problem, I start from their knowledge and experience, add my own, and we find the best solution together. When someone brings a better idea, I take it on straight away. Coaching children taught me three things I still lead by: everyone needs to be seen, a message has about ten seconds to land, and people grow best with half their time on what they already do well and half on something new. I learn an organisation quickly and deeply, mapping how things actually work, so I can support people where that knowledge has gone missing. I match each team with what they need and what they can carry, and step into the gaps between departments so delivery holds. When something needs attention, I back it with data, collecting it myself when none exists, and present it in a form that fits the people who have to act on it.
In a new role I start with the people: who is there, what we are doing and why, so I can see where I can help. I treat compliance as the licence to operate. Regulation and supervision protect trust in the financial system, and that trust serves everyone. I work in whatever tools the organisation already uses, Jira, Azure DevOps, Microsoft Project or Power BI, and choose what makes collaboration easiest. When I disagree with a decision, I raise it as a risk and make sure its owner understands the consequences and signs it off. Then I ensure that appropriate mitigations and follow-ups are put in place.
What I do
- Technical project management – IT projects with many suppliers, deadlines and rules.
- DORA and ICT risk – From the text of the law and its technical standards; in financial firms, with the Mindstreet team.
- Interim CTO or head of engineering – When engineering needs a leader or a new structure.
- Cloud and platform – Moving systems while what depends on them keeps running.
- Product leadership – A product function that decides with evidence.
- IoT: connected devices and monitoring – Sensors and field devices, and the platform behind them, run for years.
- Documents and archives – What to keep, for how long, and where.
- Applied AI in delivery – AI in the work, as far as your organisation allows.
Experience
May – Oct 2026
ICT project manager
A Swedish financial firm (Mindstreet team)
DORA readiness and authorisation programme: a function register, traceability from obligation to governing document to work item, a business impact analysis and a decision forum. AI support under human validation.
- Took the first draft of the function register to approval by the head of product and technology and the IT security lead.
- Ran the business impact analysis, including a full-day workshop, and drew up the maximum downtime, recovery time and acceptable data loss (MTPD, RTO, RPO) for processes, functions and systems.
- Built a delivery schedule from the dependencies and a capacity model, and put the resulting resource need to the steering group for decision.
- Brought the product and technology organisation into the ICT governing documents, with a daily cross-team stand-up.
- Set up AI support with read-only access and a reusable library of AI instructions, with a person reviewing every result and every source traceable.
- Set up a cross-team squad across engineering, SRE, Data & ML, and security to take on the shared DORA work, starting with privileged access management.
Nov 2022 – Jun 2026
Technical project manager
BNP Paribas Personal Finance Nordic (Mindstreet team)
Migration of a regulated deposit service at a consumer bank. E-archive tender and vendor selection, and document digitalisation. Test strategy, training of business users and reporting in Power BI.
- Joined the move of deposit accounts from an in-house system to the Vilja deposit platform after the prestudy, and took it to a one-day cutover in May 2024 after full test migrations: seamless for customers, who got a new interface announced in advance.
- Led the tender and vendor selection for one e-archive to replace several older archives: six vendors scored in an evaluation matrix, supplier due diligence on the four main contenders, and a decision by the steering committee and sponsor. I added physical archiving to the scope while the RFP was running, with minimal disruption.
- With no business requirements on record, mapped every business process in the deposit value stream with the people who worked in it, turned them into test suites in Zephyr for Jira, and ran scheduled test studios to support the business through acceptance testing.
- Ran the migration validation: a reconciliation report compared the data before and after migration, and every responsible business stakeholder reviewed and signed it off in meetings with formal minutes.
- Led the steering committees for three projects, 2023 to 2026, two at a time for most of that period, and the supplier steering committees alongside them: prepared and presented the reports on progress, deliverables, risks and costs, facilitated the decisions, and kept the minutes.
- Prepared and presented three rounds at the Nordics Investment Committee, 2023 to 2025, each with the investment mandate, business case, budget, scope and contracts, backed by the outcomes of the local and central IT validation committees.
- Took the projects through the local and central IT validation committees with complete packages: solution documents, impact assessments, data classification and privacy-by-design reviews, cloud and security assessments, and supplier due diligence.
- Constructed suites of acceptance tests for each stage: what we could prove in test, what needed a real-money pilot with friends and family, and what we could only check after go-live.
- Built a matching tool that ranked about 350,000 scanned documents against 14,871 contracts to find, on key account information, with confidence scores and direct links to each file, so the task force could finish the work in a matter of days.
- Took the eArchive project through the new-activity approval process, then helped the control office map that process and introduce others to running it.
- Moved two paper archives, in Sweden and Denmark, to a new archiving supplier: every document scanned, contracts identified and kept, and material past its retention period securely destroyed.
- When the organisation doubted a shortlisted vendor because of earlier experience, I had the concerns compiled and put to the vendor for written answers: the vendor was judged on the same terms as the others, and the organisation could trust the selection.
- Researched a recent archive tender at another bank in the group and built what we learned into the RFP and the contract proposal.
- Rebuilt the export files from a previous migration into a linked data model and worked through them with the business to confirm that every transaction reached the data warehouse.
- Initiated the contract work with the chosen vendor, from the scoping contract to the master agreement with DORA clauses, bringing in every responsible stakeholder and following up on their deliverables.
- Turned the security and data reservations from the IT validation committees into tracked actions, some for the vendor and some for our own documentation, and closed the IT risk reservations with validated evidence.
- Designed an integrity check for the scanning: every file was encrypted on its own and carried its checksum in its name, so each document could be verified against the scanner output after transfer.
- Set up Azure DevOps to follow the group project method phase by phase, so progress against it was visible to me and to the business.
- Took over the deposits project just after the pre-study, with none of the original team still there; reconstructed earlier decisions, completed the scope of an eArchive component and set up the governance path to approval.
- Brought together a team from business, data and IT to prepare the eArchive import, cataloguing and marking the material, and grew a shared ownership of the whole solution.
- Ran budget and timeline follow-ups and vendor management for all my projects.
- Made sure resources were distributed as agreed between the projects and day-to-day work, using the logged time and charts for management.
- Pinned down the GDPR anonymisation rules for the new deposit platform and drove them to approval and sign-off.
- Drove the requirements and the handover for the daily data feed from Vilja to the data office and on to the central data warehouse team.
- Took the new e-archive live and handed it to the business as an IT asset, June 2026.
- Coordinated the testing and the change advisory board for a major release of the customer web of the bank, tested with production BankID in pre-production.
- Scripted the move of my projects from Jira to Azure DevOps, both on premises, after an internal shift, and helped configure SharePoint for project work.
- When the reporting requirements of the Swedish Police (Bankinfo) grew to cover loans as well as deposits, I worked out the implementation requirements and led the work to go-live in May 2024.
- Introduced data validation to catch discrepancies after the migration.
- Automated my status reporting: Jira status into an Excel report, plus Outlook calendar sync.
2022 –
Consultant; associated consultant since December 2025
Mindstreet, Stockholm
2021 – 2022
Head of engineering and product
Bricknode
- Set the technical strategy for a next-generation SaaS platform on Google Cloud.
- Kept the .NET applications and the Azure estate running alongside it.
- Moved the organisation from separate engineering and SRE teams to DevSecOps: one backlog, shared sessions, no silos.
- Led a department of 17: developers, operations, testers and a product manager, across several feature teams.
- Introduced company-wide release management by formalising the role of the person already leading testing and releases, with sign-off before each release.
- Built Jira epic workflows: handover to testing before release, marketing before closure.
- Ran product management to the Pragmatic framework.
- Contributed to the ISO 27001 work.
- Led the move of the database from an on-premises MongoDB, patched for transaction support, to MongoDB Atlas, carried out by the architect I brought in: new environments started there, and older ones moved over in turn.
2020 – 2021
CTO; from November 2020 also group CTO of Xsave AB (Nord Fondkommission and Ymer Partners)
Nord Fondkommission
- Recruited and led a local team of five working DevSecOps (three engineers, a UX designer and a data engineer), and promoted one engineer to lead the offshore delivery partners.
- Built group IT for both companies in a shared office: network, security systems, cameras.
- Gave each company its own Office 365 tenant, with SSO and Atlassian integrations.
- The team delivered a product approval flow and portfolio rebalancing for clients.
- Set up compliant sign-off by UX, compliance and the business in native Jira workflows.
- Set up product management and MiFID II, GDPR and ISO 27001 policies.
- Ran a hybrid estate of on-premises servers, AWS and Google Cloud.
- Moved market and portfolio data to AWS; daily transaction reporting stayed on premises.
- Assembled a team at Nord Fondkommission that organised itself and built an event-based straight-through flow into Bricknode Financial Systems, replacing the manual steps.
- Moved the old platform piece by piece: whenever a part of the legacy infrastructure needed attention, we moved it to the new one, so the team kept building forward.
- Wrote a Python client for the Bricknode SOAP API (2020), public on GitHub.
- Moved the company to home working when Covid hit, and work carried on as before: support ran over Teams, and I prepared each new computer and sent it out by courier.
2008 – 2020
Lead developer, product owner, product manager, senior product manager
Episerver (now Optimizely)
Selected for the President’s Club 2018. Product management of cloud services for AI personalisation, site search and predictive analytics, across the life cycle, pricing and go-to-market. Earlier front-end lead, product owner for personalisation and search, and full-stack developer.
- Represented Episerver at industry events, analyst meetings and webinars.
- Spoke at Episerver Ascend and similar events in Las Vegas, Miami, London, Copenhagen and Helsinki, shaping the product story to the theme of each event.
- Delivered the front end of the Episerver cloud services straight from the cloud, so every customer always had the latest version.
- Led proofs of concept for AI and machine learning with customers.
- As a developer: C# REST APIs, JavaScript single-page apps and Elasticsearch integrations.
- Moved code and releases from Microsoft TFS to Bitbucket, Jira and TeamCity.
- Designed and built most of the licence system for StarMail in the Create+ and Relate+ licences, including the SQL query that checked whether any included sends were left that month, and worked on the licence transfer.
- Contributed to PowerSlice, an open-source Episerver CMS add-on: the interface reworked for Episerver 7.5, keyboard navigation and NuGet packaging.
- Built a tool in 2019 to sync the Aha! product roadmaps with Jira.
2000 –
Founder
Mettle AB, sole trader as Mettle IT & Media Solutions until 2020
- Built and have run the TermoSense platform for SensiNet since 2008, supplied as OEM: the web platform, the field gateway software and the SMS alarm path; over 700 million reports to date and 90+ field devices by 2022.
- Product owner for it, from the roadmap to the changelog customers read in the app in English and Swedish.
- In 2026 modernised the platform: PHP 8.4 on a new server, gateway 2.0 reporting over an authenticated REST API, a rebuilt SMS gateway, and alerts that fire when something goes quiet.
- I build with an AI coding agent and review its work. An AI agent investigates each service-desk ticket and drafts the reply, and I approve every reply before it reaches a customer.
- Data collection and visualisation for food, fuel and transport. MetLex since 2026.
- Ran the gateway fleet as one: every unit on the same code base, with validated updates rolled out automatically to all of them.
- Built MetLex to bring reliability, depth and accuracy to AI answers on financial regulation: every answer cites the passage it rests on, so both the person asking and the readers of the finished material can check it in seconds.
- Gateway 2.0 in 2026: each box registers once and gets its own secret, reports over HTTPS with short-lived tokens, takes commands over an outbound channel, and stays reachable for recovery when it goes quiet.
- About 25 gateway releases from June to September 2026, staged through a preview channel and a canary box before the rest of the fleet.
- Upgraded from PHP 7.4 to 8.4 by moving to a new server, with one test suite run on both versions; production cut over by moving one IP address.
- Database work while the system stayed live: a storage migration, then a slow-query campaign that cut one alarm count from 143 seconds to 1.3.
- Rebuilt the SMS alarm gateway on a current stack, found on a separate test bench why the modem stalled when sending, and fixed it by patching the C code of the SMS software gammu.
- Rebuilt the database replica and the nightly backups, and added alerts that fire when a heartbeat stops.
- Moved the platform, with its database replica, to Google Cloud in 2020; the data moved over by replication.
- Set up the service desk in Jira so an AI agent under its own account investigates new tickets every hour, with read-only access to production, and leaves a root cause and draft reply for my approval.
- Gave the agent runbooks for deploys and troubleshooting and a least-privilege bot identity; every production deploy waits for my go-ahead.
- Triaged 990 tasks from 15 years of requests into the Jira roadmap, dated from measured velocity.
- Support to release in one flow: each fix linked to the support ticket behind it, from branch, test, tag and go-live to the customer reply.
- Shipped over 30 versions of the customer web app from May to October 2026, adding among other things self-service password reset.
- Designed the platform around inheritance and storage-agnostic layers: an entity, handler and factory framework from 2008, later storage interfaces for mail and documents.
- Kept the REST API strictly resource-oriented, and chose between options by measuring them, such as call patterns and the cost of loops, before writing the leanest one.
- Replaced the laptop wired to the sensor receiver at each installation with a small Linux gateway I built in 2009. Any receiver could pick up the sensors, so the new box ran beside the old set-up as a live trial before the switch.
- Turned a single distance reading into volume for fuel and environmental tanks at petrol stations and car dealerships, 2013 to 2020: standing and lying cylinders and square tanks, each reading converted through the geometry of its tank.
- Built a generic read-through cache in 2010: on a miss, one request fetches the value through a callback while the others wait, and cached objects sit in a tree, so clearing one clears what depends on it. Later made storage-agnostic: Memcached, APC or file.
- Once people other than me could change data, I added history tables filled by database triggers: changes record who made them, and a record can be rebuilt as it stood at any time since. That let me show customers how any setting came to be, and gave SensiNet a full audit trail whenever it needed one.
- When SensiNet brought out hardware with several sensors per device in 2011, reworked the data model into one sender carrying many sensors, and moved the existing data, about 23 million reports, over while reporting carried on.
- Built a full-screen bus depot view for large displays in 2016, showing the buses by ramp so the crew could find them, with filters and automatic refresh.
- Small builds alongside: real-time departures of SL, Stockholm public transport, for the info screens of a Kista office (2017), and a low-cost website on a text-file CMS for a New York firm (2013).
2007 – 2008
Software engineer
Netstar
StarMail, a mass-mail service; an on-call phone system on Asterisk.
- Helped expand the cluster behind the mass-mail service, where one broker server split each send across three distribution servers for faster delivery.
- Built hybrid encryption between the mail-sending client installed on customer machines and the service: a unique symmetric key for each transfer, encrypted with an asymmetric key pair.
- Turned the new message wizard, designed by a UX designer on the team, into a working page in the web interface of the service: a better-looking, more streamlined way to write messages.
- Built an on-call switchboard on Asterisk for the support of Getupdated, the sister consultancy, sending each call in turn to whoever had signed up for duty.
2006 – 2007
IT manager
Noble Entertainment
- Ran the website, hosting and internal IT; web design and DVD authoring for the film catalogue.
2003 – 2004
Systems integrator
CIT Sweden
Building automation integration as a contractor, completing the work I had started at Johnson Controls.
2001 – 2003
IT manager and systems integrator
Johnson Controls Norden
OPC integration requirements for Kista Science Tower (NCC): building automation, Kone elevators and Schneider Electric lighting tied into one visualisation and notification view; quoted in the ICONICS case study.
- Steered the vendors to commit fully to OPC, including its alarm interface, so the supervisory system received alarms directly instead of rebuilding them from raw data. The project delivered floor plans per zone for building automation, ventilation and lighting, lifts in their own views, and alarm escalation to text messages.
Education and certification
2017
PMC-III (Foundations, Focus, Build)
Pragmatic Institute
2013
Human-Computer Interaction (online course, Coursera)
UC San Diego
2001
Qualified vocational education, virtual reality
Nackademin, Stockholm
Tools and methods
Jira and Confluence, Azure DevOps, Microsoft Project, Kanban and Scrum, Power BI, Office 365, Google Cloud, AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, GitOps, infrastructure as code, PHP, C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, Perl, SQL and MariaDB.
Industries
Banking and consumer credit, investment services, temperature monitoring (food retail, public transport, research), building automation, software products.
Languages
Swedish (native), English (fluent).
Outside work
- Guitarist in Soen; co-wrote, engineered and produced the albums Cognitive (2012) and Tellurian (2014), through to the hand-over for mixing and mastering.
- Football coach, Solberga BK, 2015–2017, with youth sports leadership courses. Coaching children taught me three things I still lead by: everyone needs to be seen, a message has about ten seconds to land, and people grow best with half their time on what they already do well and half on something new.