Marko Zerdin

Principal Software Engineer & Founder

I'm Marko, a founder-engineer based in Bath, UK. I have over 25 years experience in enterprise software, combinatorial optimisation, configuration management, and DevOps. I have built and led two B2B product companies, one SaaS. I am the creator of a category-defining configuration management platform with first-of-its-kind automated software migration, used to accelerate software deployment and maintenance, document live complex systems, and de-risk transformations across enterprise software ecosystems. I am also a former algorithms developer at ClickSoftware, with peer-reviewed publications on large-scale field-service scheduling.

Technical Proficiencies

Programming Languages & Frameworks: C#, .NET (Core & Framework), Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF), Entity Framework (EF), ASP.NET, Blazor, PostSharp, TypeScript, JavaScript, React, Next.js, Astro, SQL, PL/SQL, PowerShell, Python, C/C++, Java, XSLT, XPath, Perl, Wolfram Language / Mathematica
Cloud & DevOps: Azure (App Service, Event Grid, Functions, SQL, Storage, serverless), Terraform, AWS, GCP, Docker, microservices, distributed systems, event-driven architecture (EDA), OAuth, JWT, RBAC, Git, GitHub, GitHub Actions, CI/CD pipelines, IaaS, SaaS
Data / DBs: Oracle (DB admin, DB design, PL/SQL, query optimisation), MS SQL Server (T-SQL), SQLite, ArangoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB, Elasticsearch, automated data pipelines, object-relational mapping (ORM)
AI & Machine Learning: OpenAI, Claude / Claude Code, Cursor / Cursor CLI, Bolt
Enterprise: Cloud-native design, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), cross-cloud data migrations, enterprise software migrations, Salesforce (metadata API, partner API, tooling API, Apex, configuration generation / automation, security setup and analysis)
Testing & Automation: Playwright, XUnit, NUnit, test-driven development (TDD), system-level measurement and test design, test methodology, test data design and seeding, concurrent testing, fuzz testing, search-based software testing (SBST), adversarial testing, automated configuration tuning, automated configuration capture and analysis, process-centred and end-to-end simulation, automation of hard-to-automate problems (e.g. software migration including feature mapping)
Algorithms: combinatorial optimisation, metaheuristics, local search, simulated annealing, GRASP, genetic algorithms, ant-colony optimisation, genetic programming, linear programming, mixed-integer programming, complexity analysis, run time optimisation, space optimisation, algorithm design, numerical methods for science
Paradigms: declarative programming, functional programming, logic programming, object-oriented design, SOLID, DDD, constraint logic programming, constraint propagation, design patterns

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Work

  1. Company
    Configo Software
    Role
    Founder & Principal Engineer
    Date
  2. Company
    Zany Ants (Xoom Tools)
    Role
    Founder & Principal Engineer
    Date
  3. Company
    Independent Consultant
    Role
    Senior Logic / Algorithms Expert
    Date
  4. Company
    ClickSoftware
    Role
    Senior Algorithms Developer
    Date
  5. Company
    Ixtlan Team
    Role
    Software Developer
    Date
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Notable Achievements

We all have our moments of glory. Sometimes it's a particularly elegant part of an otherwise ordinary project, sometimes it is an ingenious solution for a specific challenge, and sometimes it's a culmination of many thousands of hours of work spread over many years. These are some of mine.

  • On-Premise to SaaS Product Transformation

    Transformed an on-premise, single-product configuration management solution into a multi-product SaaS with automated live-system documentation, health checks, and pre-migration gap analysis.

    Impact

    • New customer onboarding for Salesforce Application Management Services cut from weeks to days.

  • Automated Software Migration

    Created a first-of-its-kind automated general-purpose software migration solution (configuration + data + functional mapping), enabling cross-product moves with minimal downtime and risk.

    Impact

    • Pre-migration assessment and gap analysis for Marathon Oil was decreased from 3 weeks to 4 days.

  • ClickSoftware Configuration Suite

    Built Xoom, a configuration management suite for ClickSoftware, licensed by enterprises including Sky, Bell Canada, and CenturyLink. Where there were previously no means to do any automated configuration management, Xoom enabled revision control, environment comparison, configuration analysis, and automated deployment.

    Impact

    • With Xoom, Sky successfully operated 30+ environments, keeping them all in sync, allowing over 6-times increase in business experiments and tuning.
    • Bell Canada went from 4 to 15 production deployments per year, dramatically decreasing time-to-live for operational changes, with direct annual benefit of $1.5M, and significantly greater intangible benefits in business agility.

  • Extended Go-Live with Daily System Reconfiguration

    Suggested, designed and implemented extended go-live with daily system reconfiguration for Sky to avoid the risk of all-at-once production deployments.

    Impact

    • A recent experience prior to this approach being implemented resulted in a week-long running outages in production costing millions. With extended go-live, two configuration were implemented in parallel, with one bedding in and one gradually phased out over a month. This allowed Sky to see the problems way before they had an operational impact, and allowed all caches to warm natually, without any additional performance impact. Final go-live was just another regular day.

  • Optimisation Algorithms

    Designed and implemented custom production optimisers for large field-service operations.

    Impact

    • Custom optimiser for long-term planning of outages during maintenance for National Grid, enabling a 15% increased resource utilisation and 8% increase in network capacity during maintenance work.
    • Intelligent task grouping initially for Deutsche Telekom, later included in ClickSoftware and ultimately, after acquisition, into Salesforce product.

  • Full-Lifecycle Field-Service Simulation

    Built a full-lifecycle service simulator for Sky to model medium- and long-term impacts of proposed service policy changes.

    Impact

    • Avoiding the usual guesswork about the operational impact, the simulation used production task data to model the whole lifecycle including task creation, appointment booking, in-day optimisation and night optimisation, and assessed the impact on lead times, schedule efficiency, capacity and cost as a result of various proposed service policy changes.

  • Critical Query Optimisation

    Cut a critical tax-registry SQL query from 45 minutes to 15 seconds (~180x) for Slovenia's national tax authority.

Core Strengths

While I have broad experience across many domains, there are some core strengths that I have developed over time. When utilised, these can provide a much quicker time to value and a significant competitive advantage.

  • Proven Record of Product Creation

    Creating products that are well-architected, performant, innovative, solve real problems, and that people enjoy using and keep using for years.

  • Architecture & DevOps

    Architecture for long‑running, highly configurable enterprise software; configuration DevOps, configuration tuning (aligning software with business needs), migration tooling, and dependency & impact analysis

  • Stakeholder Discovery & Systems Design

    Align executives, users, and engineers; reframe problems and ship lean, scalable solutions that holistically address business concerns

  • Data Architecture & Performance Engineering

    Schema/index design, explain plans, query planning/profiling; SQL Server, Oracle, ArangoDB

  • Turning Hard-to-Automate Problems into Maintainable Systems

    AI-boosted development workflows (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Bolt, Codex) applied with judgement and experience to ship clean, well-designed, maintainable software