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Patric Bucher — Engineering Director

Profile

Engineering Director and maker at heart: 20 years of shipping products, today leading four teams (30+ engineers) behind the products that earn 70–80% of LumApps’ revenue.

Slim processes, empowered teams: brought Beekeeper and LumApps teams together after the merger, moved every team to AI-native development, and ended every-other-day outages on the core CMS.

Pragmatic, not dogmatic: starts from the customer and the business, keeps technology and process simple, uses data to see how the product performs, and treats how people work together as the hard problem.

Educator and enabler: grew three engineers into Tech Leads and on to engineering managers at Beekeeper, in teams where around half of engineers stayed 5–10 years.

Expertise

  • Leadership
  • Team Management
  • Software & System Architecture
  • AI & Cloud Platforms

Work Experience

LumApps — Engineering Director

Zürich · August 2025-present

  • Lead four cross-functional teams (30+ engineers) in communication and collaboration.
  • Lead the teams behind the CMS and social products, which generate 70–80% of company revenue. Set a stability baseline with the CMS team that ended outages and manual interventions that had hit every other day.
  • Shape strategy with peer directors, VPs and the CPO in weekly syncs and quarterly on-sites, driving LumApps from intranet to an AI-native hub connecting third-party systems. Negotiate headcount allocation across teams.
  • Help shape quarterly leadership alignment and directors’ days on AI enablement, DevX and DevOps, QA, infrastructure cost, and upskilling managers and engineers. Contribute to a shared talent bar, calibrating people against the wider organization rather than within teams.
  • Upskilled all teams in AI-native development, winning over hesitant engineers with hands-on results; weekly merged PRs are up 1.5x in five months.
  • After the merger, fixed SQLAlchemy performance issues in Beekeeper’s 15-year-old Python monolith, halving its database CPU and memory and saving ~$150k a year in a few weeks of hands-on work.
  • Technologies: Python, Java, LangChain, Strands, AWS, GCP, SQL, Kafka, Kubernetes, React

Beekeeper — Tech Lead / Engineering Manager

Zürich · 2019-2025

  • Grew the team to 15 engineers, then split it into a dedicated mobile team and a chat, streams and content team. Ran both for two years with a deputy leading mobile.
  • Developed three engineers into Tech Leads: one took over the new mobile team and one went on to lead another team, both in early 2025, and one took over the chat and streams team. All three went on to become engineering managers.
  • Built teams people stayed in: the three Tech Leads have 5–8 years’ tenure, and around half of engineers have 5–10 years.
  • Took over a 10-engineer tiger team (web, backend, iOS, Android) replatforming chat onto MongooseIM. Drove the last 20% to done, load- and performance-tested, and migrated ~1,300 customers (1M+ users in total) within a year through a gradual rollout.
  • Delivered LLM-powered features with LangChain4j on Java backends: comment suggestions, post rewriting and typo fixing, and proactive moderation against the terms of service. Rewriting and moderation are used weekly by ~80% of customers.
  • Led team and product integration of Lua, a Copenhagen-based task-management platform acquired in 2021: merged its engineers into the team, hired three engineers, and moved Lua’s product onto Beekeeper’s backend stack.
  • Technologies: Java, Python, LangChain4j, Kotlin, Swift, Go, Vue, AWS, GCP, SQL, Kafka, Kubernetes

Younitec — Senior Software Engineer & Co-Owner

Cham · 2012-2018

  • Joined as co-owner in the company’s third year and helped grow it from 4 to 9 people. Owned sales, pricing, client relationships and hiring alongside engineering, and shared leadership of engineers, freelancers and students.
  • Consulted on-site for a top Swiss industrial enterprise, delivering a business-critical elevator calculation system behind its worldwide SAP quotation process (thousands of calculations a day). It is still one of Younitec’s largest projects.
  • Technologies: C#, .NET, ASP.NET, WCF, WPF, Xamarin, TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, PHP, SQL, PostgreSQL, Azure

Erni — Professional Consultant

Baar · 2010-2011

  • Built the main test application (C++/Qt) for a major Swiss pharmaceutical company’s in-house real-time framework for analysis instruments, in a regulated pharmaceutical setting. Its JavaScript-based test DSL let engineers script and run tests instead of testing by hand, speeding up releases; it stayed their main test tool.
  • Technologies: C++, Qt, JavaScript, Linux

Carag — Software Engineer

Baar · 2006-2009

  • Sole software engineer at a 20-person medical research company. Built a generic Windows driver framework connecting in-house medical devices, such as an infrared sensor measuring blood flow in the brain, and desktop apps to record and visualize their data, working alongside the hardware engineer.
  • Technologies: C++, Qt, SQL, Windows Driver Kit, Linux, Lotus Notes and Domino, IT Infrastructure

Languages

  • English: C2
  • German: native

Interests

  • Running, Cycling & Skiing
  • Books & Cooking
  • Music Nerd
  • Compilers & Virtual Machines
  • Event Based & Distributed Systems
  • Machine Learning & LLMs