Patrick Ruckstuhl
Technology and engineering leader · Zurich, Switzerland
I lead engineering organisations and still like to get into the architecture. Over 20+ years in financial services software I have moved from hands-on architect to running a global product development organisation of around 75 people.
My work centres on setting technical direction, modernising large platforms (rich client to web, VMs to Kubernetes and GitOps) and building teams that deliver. Lately I spend a lot of time on AI-assisted engineering, including fine-tuning small language models for domain-specific tooling.
Background
- 2024 – today
- Senior Manager, FIS Global product development for the Securities Finance, Trading & Collateral Platform
- 2014 – 2024
- Technical Architect, FIS / SunGard Technical lead for the platform; new cloud-native collateral solution; web and Kubernetes modernisation
- 2007 – 2014
- Lead Software Architect, Zühlke Architecture and delivery for clients in banking, telecommunications and insurance
- 2001 – 2007
- MSc, ETH Zürich Software engineering and visual computing
Side projects
- fava-nl2bql Ask questions about a Beancount ledger in plain English; a small tuned model turns them into queries.
- bql-lora Training data generator and dataset for fine-tuning LLMs on the Beancount Query Language, validated against the real query engine.
- llm-finetune-skills The fine-tuning workflow as reusable Claude Code skills: data checks, local LoRA training, Ollama packaging and evaluation.
- beancounttools Importers, plugins and price fetchers for Beancount, published on PyPI.
- flux-check-hook Pre-commit hook that validates Flux CD HelmRelease resources before they reach the cluster.