Hendrik W. Hansen
Tech Lead & hands-on Solution Architect
Tech Lead and hands-on Solution Architect with more than 20 years of experience on complex, regulated and business-critical platforms. I take ownership from business needs to architecture, code and operations.
I have been an independent consultant since 2004, much of that time in the financial sector. I work strategically on direction, standards and decisions, and hands-on with the hard parts of the code, incidents, performance and data.
Services
Areas where I typically contribute as a consultant.
Tech Lead and delivery ownership
I set direction and standards and look after quality and shared engineering practice through coaching, mentoring and code reviews.
Solution architecture and design
Architecture choices such as microservices or a modular monolith, integrations and interfaces, event flows and data modelling. I prepare decision papers that make the trade-offs clear.
Stakeholder management and communication
I translate between the business and engineering through workshops, breaking down requirements and managing expectations, with clear communication of risk, consequences and the basis for decisions.
Cloud, platform and DevOps
Azure with AKS/Kubernetes, Helm, Service Bus, Event Hubs and Key Vault. CI/CD and infrastructure as code with Terraform, observability, and secure, reproducible deployments.
Hands-on backend and data
Backend work in .NET, from Framework to .NET 8/9, with a focus on performance, concurrency, troubleshooting and refactoring. Data in SQL Server and Oracle: transactions, query optimisation, EF Core, Dapper and ADO.NET.
Test strategy
TDD and BDD with Specification by Example (SpecFlow), testable contracts and effective handling of databases in tests.
Compliance and data security
GDPR processes, data handling and security-conscious design in an enterprise context.
AI-assisted development
I set the framework for design, tech stack and quality requirements and use AI, mainly GitHub Copilot, for implementation and review. It increases the pace without letting quality and traceability suffer.
Selected cases
Selected assignments from financial and regulated environments.
Banking Circle
Period: Feb 2025 – Feb 2026
- Role
- Senior backend engineer (hands-on), solution architecture and design
- Challenge
- Event-driven backend services on Azure in an enterprise setup with strict requirements for robustness, traceability and operational stability.
- Contribution
- Design and implementation of a greenfield reconciliation service and a new event subscriber with idempotent processing and replay handling. Migration of services from Azure App Services to AKS using Helm.
- Result
- Consistency between databases, Event Hubs and Service Bus. Better observability through health endpoints, distributed tracing and metrics.
Letpension
Period: Aug 2019 – Jan 2025
- Role
- Solution architect, system developer and designer, team lead
- Challenge
- Pension advisory systems and data exchange with banks, a bank data centre and PFA, with long response times and poor concurrency in the database.
- Contribution
- Led work on architecture, maintainability and data access, including snapshot isolation and shorter transactions. Reference implementation of BDD with SpecFlow and an isolated database per test. Implementation of GDPR deletion processes.
- Result
- Response times and concurrency in the database improved, and the batch area was redesigned for greater stability. The deletion processes handle a database with more than 500 tables and 8 TB of data, and the codebase became easier to test.
Saxo Bank
Period: Aug 2017 – Aug 2019
- Role
- Solution architect, system developer and designer
- Challenge
- OpenAPI, which underpins the SaxoTraderGO and SaxoTraderPRO trading platforms, had to scale to a growing number of clients.
- Contribution
- Architecture and design of a new distributed cache, requirements analysis and implementation of new features. Took part in the analysis of migrating the APIs to Azure and .NET Core.
- Result
- The distributed cache went into production.
Danmarks Nationalbank
Period: Aug 2016 – Aug 2017
- Role
- Solution architect, system developer and designer, team lead
- Challenge
- FIONA, the reporting system for economic and financial figures for Danmarks Nationalbank and the Danish FSA, had to be adapted to new regulatory requirements and legislation while operations and development were outsourced.
- Contribution
- Analysis, design and implementation of the changes. As team lead I specified processes and handed over knowledge during the outsourcing. I also handled complex support issues involving databases and replication.
- Result
- Two production releases with updated schemas from EBA and EIOPA. The outsourced team was subsequently self-sufficient and supported the applications without problems.
Clients I have worked for
- Banking Circle
- Saxo Bank
- Danmarks Nationalbank
- Letpension
- BankInvest
- Naturstyrelsen
- e-Boks
- Domstolsstyrelsen
- Banedanmark
- Toyota Danmark
About me
I have worked as an independent software development consultant since 2004, mainly on complex, regulated and business-critical platforms, particularly in the financial sector, but also for other large Danish companies and public organisations. The assignments have ranged from architecture and design to hands-on development, team leadership and requirements analysis.
I create momentum by translating between stakeholders and engineering and establishing a shared technical direction. I safeguard delivery through robust processes: CI/CD, test strategy, a review culture and operability.
My responsibility follows the solution from the non-functional requirements through solution architecture and implementation to operations.
Technologies and skills
- Architecture and leadership
- Solution architecture
- Microservices and modular monolith
- Event-driven architectures
- Data modelling
- Requirements breakdown and workshops
- Mentoring, coaching and code reviews
- Cloud and platform
- Azure
- AKS / Kubernetes
- Helm
- Terraform
- Azure Service Bus
- Azure Event Hubs
- Azure Key Vault
- Application Insights
- Azure DevOps
- Backend and data
- C#
- .NET Framework
- .NET Core
- .NET 8
- .NET 9
- EF Core
- Dapper
- ADO.NET
- SQL Server
- Oracle
- Redis
- Quality and process
- TDD
- BDD
- Specification by Example
- SpecFlow
- CI/CD
- Test strategy
- Operability and observability
- GDPR
- AI-assisted development
- GitHub Copilot
- Claude Code
- Cursor
- Spec-based development
Contact
Get in touch about an assignment or a possible collaboration. You can also contact me directly.
- Phone
- +45 51 34 19 76
- linkedin.com/in/hendrikwhansen