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About this site

This is my personal site, mostly about:

Career

I'm Wouter Coekaerts. I'm a Senior Software Engineer, Java expert, software security enthusiast.

I started my career at Business Solution Builders, developing the tech stack of a suite of back office applications for banking and insurance. I took a leading role in gradually evolving a powerful but dated in-house application framework (based on J2EE, Swing) to one based on more modern technologies (Spring, Vaadin).

Then I helped grow Square (now Block) from a startup into a large well-known financial technology company in the US. In the first couple years I drove the rebuilding of financial reconciliation systems: detecting anomalies and getting the financial reporting ready for IPO. For 8 years I was technical lead of the company's main ML data systems: data aggregation and feature extraction for machine learning model training and real time evaluation. What started out as fraud controls that allowed Square to thrive in risky new markets (allowing micro-merchants to accept credit card payments), grew into shared ML infrastructure adopted by efforts across the company (including underwriting loans for Square Capital and peer-to-peer payments in CashApp).

After Square I took some time off to focus on other priorities and recharge. During that time I picked up development of a side project, FlowTracker.

I'm currently open to new job opportunities in Belgium (Antwerp/Herentals area) or remote.