Jussi Hallila

I’m Jussi Hallila. I build the platforms other engineers, and now their agents, build on.

I’m a Finnish software engineer living in Arnhem, the Netherlands. I studied software engineering in Lapland, with detours to Missouri and Shanghai, and wrote my first production code at CERN, building a database and web frontend for the TOTEM experiment.

Most of my career has been in Dublin: business intelligence at IBM, insurance services at Liberty IT, a mobile marketing platform at Brandtone, and then leading frontend engineering and architecture at VSWare and Visma Labs. Somewhere along the way I became the person who cares about build pipelines, deployment and the boundaries between systems as much as the features on top.

Today I’m Head of Engineering at Roadie. Alongside that I run Ilities, a small consultancy for codebase rescue, architecture reviews and the structure that makes AI tools useful instead of noisy. In 2025 I built ctxpack there, one of the early MCP gateways. These days I build Viberglass, an open-source workspace for teams and their coding agents, and spend more time than is reasonable measuring how fast large open models run on hardware I already own.

This site started in 2016 as notes to myself on JVM and frontend work. The older articles are still here; some of them have aged better than others. If you want help with a codebase or an agent setup, see how I work with teams.

Experience

Full CV on LinkedIn →

  1. 2021 – present

    Head of Engineering (since 2024), Roadie

    • Joined in 2021 as employee #5, one of the founding engineers, and have led engineering since 2024.
    • Lead engineering for Roadie’s developer platform built on Backstage.
    • Shipped openroadie, a live, permissioned, agent-ready graph of services, teams and dependencies.
    • Built roadie-agent, the library customers use to extend Roadie from inside their own networks.
    • Co-maintain 50+ open-source Backstage plugins and libraries on npm, with around 960,000 downloads a month (October 2026).

  2. 2018 – present

    Independent consultant, Ilities

    • Codebase rescue, architecture reviews and migrations that modernise legacy systems without full rewrites.
    • Built ctxpack (2025), one of the early MCP gateways: context packs of tools, prompts and resources, deployed to Claude, ChatGPT or any MCP client over OAuth 2.1.
    • Building Viberglass, an open-source workspace for teams and coding agents, and multi-agent orchestration for clients.

  3. 2019 – 2021

    Software Architect, Visma Labs

    • Planned and led the migration from a monolith to a modular monolith and microservices.
    • Moved workloads from VMs to containers and owned the frontend and backend build pipelines.

  4. 2017 – 2019

    Head of Frontend Engineering, VSWare

    • Led customer-facing development and user experience for a school administration platform, managing a team of 18 developers.
    • Architected the migration from a jQuery/JSP frontend to a modular Vue.js single-page app.

  5. 2015 – 2017

    Senior Software Engineer, Brandtone

    • Led development of the core capabilities of the company’s largest product, a mobile marketing platform.
    • Introduced DevOps practice: Ansible, immutable infrastructure, chat-ops and an automated Jenkins deployment pipeline.
    • Modernised the frontend with React, Webpack and the Node.js toolchain.

  6. 2014 – 2015

    Software Engineer, Liberty IT

    • Built SOA web services that calculate insurance rates.

  7. 2011 – 2014

    BI & Metrics Software Developer, IBM

    • Built business intelligence solutions for IBM delivery centres across EMEA and the US.
    • Introduced continuous integration, automated testing and Scrum to the team.

  8. 2009

    Web Developer and Database Administrator, CERN

    • Designed and built the database and web frontend for the TOTEM experiment.

Education

  • Bachelor of Software Engineering, Lapland University of Applied Sciences (2006 – 2011). Thesis graded 5/5.
  • Exchange studies at Missouri State University (2008) and Shanghai University (2009).

Certifications

  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (2019)
  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (2019)