About

Björn Karge is an experienced Engineering Lead at Grab with over 24 years of relevant experience in building enterprise applications, technology research and development, and algorithmic optimization. He has a special focus on spatial data/GIS and distributed computing. Björn's ultimate goal is to use software as a means to an end, and he enjoys developing well-thought-out architectures, rigorous programming, and code that did not have to be written in the first place. Björn's experience includes leading solutions architecture and development, technology strategy, and team management at Kern Technology, where he served as Head of Engineering. He also worked at HERE as a Lead Engineer, where he supported the development of a digital map data platform (MapTP) and was responsible for the implementation of a transactional persistence backend, as well as spatial indexing capabilities. The field of work later shifted to the analysis of GPS trails, which led him to explore and develop various distributed storage and distributed computing solutions, making him quite familiar with technologies such as Voldemort, AWS (DynamoDB, S3, EC2), Hadoop, Spark, and TCP/IP. Björn's major technological results include Fast Global Vehicle Routing Based Solely on GPS Trails, Persistent Spatial Indexing of Geospatial Data, and Fuzzy Keyword Search. He holds a degree in Computer Science from Humboldt University of Berlin. Björn's tech stack includes Senior Software Engineer, Research Scientist, AWS, Spark, Hadoop, Search, and Backend. With his extensive experience in software development and technology research, Björn is a valuable asset to any organization looking to build enterprise applications and optimize algorithms.