Avatar of Janne Kavander

Lead Software Engineer

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Stepping into my role as Lead Software Engineer at ProcessMaker, I've transitioned from my previous startup experience to leading enterprise-scale platform development in a more established technology environment. Specifically, I lead the development and operations of ProcessMaker's Process Intelligence (PI) product, a cutting-edge platform that combines process mining and task mining to provide end-to-end visibility into business processes. This position has challenged me to apply my technical leadership skills while managing a dynamic development team, combining hands-on development with strategic technical decision-making. Since joining in April 2024, I've taken ownership of critical platform components, built teams from the ground up, and driven significant improvements across infrastructure, security, and product delivery. My experience spans the entire development lifecycle, from architecture design and cloud infrastructure to team mentorship and cross-functional collaboration, enabling me to deliver scalable solutions that serve hundreds of enterprise customers and align with ambitious business objectives.

Key Contributions

  • Took ownership of ProcessMaker's Process Intelligence platform after the company's strategic acquisition of the process mining technology, which lacked documentation, stability, and team continuity. Built a new product team from scratch, stabilized the platform within a month, and aligned stakeholders to enable a successful relaunch and sales push of this critical product offering.

  • Lead the development and technical direction of the Process Intelligence product, which uniquely combines process and task mining to provide comprehensive business process visibility. The platform uses AI-powered data collection to automatically capture data across whitelisted business applications, offering real-time analysis and prioritized automation recommendations to enterprise customers.

  • Provide ongoing technical leadership and take primary ownership of core product and infrastructure components. Lead a team of engineers while staying deeply involved in design, implementation, and architecture decisions. Set technical direction, ensure code quality and system scalability, and drive the continuous delivery of critical systems across services.

  • Designed and implemented the analytics engine integration between Process Intelligence and ProcessMaker platforms, enabling secure daily aggregation of customer data. Delivered embedded insights that serve hundreds of enterprise customers to identify bottlenecks and automation opportunities, filling a critical platform gap.

  • Identified and resolved critical platform-wide issues, including data inaccuracies, crashes, access control flaws, performance bottlenecks, and broken analytics pipelines. These improvements significantly increased system stability, data reliability, and user trust across the product.

  • Audited Azure infrastructure to identify gaps in access controls, logging, and network configurations. Led the SOC2 Type 2 certification effort by resolving security issues, improving dependency hygiene, and implementing evidence collection processes.

Additional Contributions

  • Designed and deployed multiple cloud environments from scratch in Azure and MongoDB, populated with real production customer data. Enabled safe feature testing, external partner integrations, customer demos, and improved developer efficiency while significantly reducing deployment risks.

  • Refactored core backend components, including document models and MongoDB aggregation pipelines, to improve query reliability, simplify data access patterns, and reduce technical debt, enabling scalable long-term development.

  • Accelerated development velocity by introducing standardized GitHub and team collaboration practices, including branch protections, commit policies, code ownership mapping, and review workflows. The changes improved team coordination, reduced overhead, and enabled faster cross functional delivery.

  • Onboarded and mentored multiple software and DevOps engineers into a newly formed team by creating training material, documentation, provisioning access, and running workshops, reducing average ramp-up time by over 60 percent.

  • Designed and co-developed a Chrome extension to enable process mining data collection on macOS, addressing a strategic platform gap. This opened access to enterprise users in the U.S. and Europe, where macOS adoption is high, and significantly expanded customer reach in previously unsupported markets.

  • Enabled business process automation via PM export support, allowing customers to export enriched event logs directly to ProcessMaker BPMN for building actionable workflow automations.

Further Impact

  • Resolved major customer-impacting bugs across analytics pipelines and dashboards, directly improving platform reliability and reducing support load.

  • Expanded monitoring coverage across Azure environments and core product metrics by integrating key signals into Grafana dashboards and alerting systems, improving visibility and responsiveness across engineering and product teams.

  • Led the rebranding initiative across multiple services, coordinating technical changes, deployment readiness, and stakeholder communication.

  • Led Product Increment (PI) planning quarterly for my team within a broader cross-functional planning cycle, aligning team goals with product priorities and driving consistent delivery through biweekly sprints.

Professional Growth and Impact

My tenure at ProcessMaker represents a significant evolution in my career, transitioning from a startup environment to leading enterprise-level development initiatives. This role has deepened my expertise in technical leadership, infrastructure management, and enterprise security compliance, while maintaining my hands-on approach to software development. The experience of building and stabilizing a newly acquired platform, combined with leading SOC2 certification efforts and managing enterprise customer requirements, has expanded my skill set beyond traditional development into business-critical areas of platform operations and security.

The diversity of challenges—from technical debt resolution and platform modernization to team building and stakeholder alignment—has strengthened my ability to balance strategic thinking with tactical execution. Working with enterprise customers and managing complex cloud infrastructures has given me valuable insights into scalable architecture design and operational excellence that complement my full-stack development background.

Looking Forward

As I continue in this role, my focus remains on driving innovation while ensuring platform stability and security. The combination of technical leadership, team development, and hands-on engineering continues to be both challenging and rewarding, positioning me well for future opportunities in senior technical leadership roles where I can leverage my comprehensive experience across startup agility and enterprise-scale operations.