Fifteen years of keeping systems alive in production.

Pascal Vetsch

I am Pascal Vetsch. Moontravel Technologies is my company, and I am the person who writes the code. Ten years at IBM Research Zürich taught me security, infrastructure, and what breaks at scale. The last four, leading the API behind a DeFi protocol across multiple chains, taught me what it costs when it breaks at three in the morning. For the past five months I have been building products a different way: AI does the typing, I do the deciding.

LinkedIn

What that looked like in practice

10x faster responses

A GraphQL caching layer plus reworked AWS infrastructure cut average API response times by an order of magnitude, and monthly infrastructure spend by more than twenty percent.

Shipped inside an IBM product

Topic-level encryption and key rotation for Apache Kafka, designed and written in Go. IBM took it into the Event Streams product.

1,000+ systems automated

Python pipelines for inventory sync and compliance alerting carried the IBM global data lake through a formal audit, with no serious incident since launch.

Track record

Since March 2026

AI-accelerated product work

Moontravel Technologies

Five months of building products this way full time. I design the architecture, the data model, and the failure handling, then the implementation is generated against that design, reviewed, typed, and tested. Ordering software, workshop planning, training plans: everything under Work was built like this, and it runs next to the API lead role.

2022 to now

API Lead

A multichain DeFi protocol

Primary backend engineer for the TypeScript and Node.js API behind two DeFi frontends across multiple chains, on an anonymous placement. It ingests subgraphs, RPC nodes, and market data, stores it in PostgreSQL, and serves GraphQL to the apps. Design through production, on-call included. Also Solidity tooling, security monitoring, and the bug bounty programme.

2018 to 2022

Research Security Engineer

IBM Research Zürich

Owned the security and compliance strategy for the IBM global data lake. Designed Kafka topic-level encryption in Go. Contributed to the architecture of Pathfinder, a distributed Java and Quarkus metadata and knowledge graph system, and proposed the use case that became its main direction.

2014 to 2018

IT Engineer

IBM Research Zürich

Ran the campus Enterprise Linux estate with automated Puppet provisioning, and designed and operated the Cisco campus network with a hard focus on security and compliance.

2012 to 2014

IT Support Professional

IBM Research Zürich

Device provisioning, data migration, and end-user support in the IBM European research lab.

What I work with

Languages

  • TypeScript / Node.js
  • Python
  • Go
  • Java (Quarkus)
  • Solidity

Backend

  • API design
  • GraphQL
  • PostgreSQL
  • Data pipelines
  • Apache Kafka
  • Distributed systems

Product

  • React Native / Expo
  • Next.js
  • App store releases
  • Self-hosted Docker

Cloud and operations

  • AWS
  • Cloudflare
  • Kubernetes / OpenShift
  • CI/CD
  • Sentry
  • Production on-call

Security

  • Information security strategy
  • Compliance automation
  • Bug bounty management
  • On-chain monitoring

Web3

  • DeFi protocol backends
  • On-chain indexing
  • Subgraphs
  • RPC infrastructure

Spoken languages

  • German, native
  • English, fluent
Back to the work

Tell me what you want built.

A few lines about the problem is enough. You get a straight answer on whether it is worth building and what it would cost, not a sales sequence.

Start with an email

Opens an email with three questions already filled in. You get a reply within one working day.

pascal@moontravel.ch