Hermann "Ham" Vocke

Gigs Remote, Germany

Interim Head of Engineering Jun 2025 - present

• Led the entire engineering organization of 35 engineers.
• Reshaped team structures for better delivery performance, clearer ownership and reduced cognitive load.
• Established and improved engineering and product development processes.
• Partnered with Engineering Managers and Product Managers to ensure sustainable and predictable software delivery.

Engineering Manager Aug 2024 - Jun 2025

• Led two engineering teams, focused on fostering a healthy and effective engineering culture built on trust, excellence and collaboration.
• Grew the engineering organization by redesigning our engineering hiring process and acting as the hiring manager for our backend engineering positions.
• Designed and established engineering-wide on-call procedures.
• Established Gigs’ first platform engineering team.

Stack Overflow Remote, Germany

Principal Software Engineer Apr 2023 - Aug 2024

• Drove the modernization of Stack’s legacy system and architecture.
• Established a shared technical vision and common direction across all engineering teams.
• Enabled engineering teams to adopt new development practices.
• Collaborated with the CTO on strategic initiatives.
• Led the engineering-wide architecture guild.

Staff Software Engineer Feb 2022 - Apr 2023

• Created a sustainable, effective and high-trust environment as Tech Lead for an engineering team
• Designed, built and shipped new features by pairing with product managers, guiding architecture, providing and supporting technical design, hands-on implementation and monitoring our systems in production.
• Shaped the architectural direction of our system to enable organisational growth, allow for safe experimentation and evolution, and make a huge monolithic codebase easier to work with.

Software Engineer Apr 2019 - Feb 2022

• Built features for Stack Overflow and Stack Overflow for Teams as part of a cross-functional engineering team.
• Prototyped and built Stacks-Editor, a new Markdown & rich text editor used by all Teams users and users across the Stack Exchange network.
• Migrated over 50 million questions and answers on all Stack Exchange sites to Commonmark, replacing home-grown Markdown parsers with open source libraries.
• Built and rolled out support for Markdown tables across 150+ sites across the StackExchange network, including stackoverflow.com.

Thoughtworks Hamburg, Germany

Lead Software Developer May 2018 - Mar 2019

Technical lead for teams. Hands-on design and implementation of high-traffic microservice systems. Coaching and mentoring teams to adopt agile practices, continuous delivery, pair programming, and cloud infrastructure. Running workshops and trainings about software architeture, API design, and Continuous Delivery for various clients.

Senior Software Developer Sep 2014 - May 2018

Software development, consulting, and coaching for different clients. Living and teaching agile methodologies, pair programming, continuous delivery, test automation, DevOps and TDD. Building microservices, cloud infrastructure, IoT ecosystems, mobile apps and backend systems.