Career arc
I started writing Java in 2006, while still at university in Budapest. The twenty years since have taken me through telco platforms, post-trade pipelines at Morgan Stanley, internal HR tooling at IBM (where I received a Challenge Coin for mentoring junior developers and teaching the OO mindset to non-engineers), government tax modernization at NAV in Hungary, instant-payment integration at the neobank BinX, and most recently legacy Java migration in the energy sector at German energy trading company Uniper Energy. The thread connecting all of it is regulated industries — places where the rules are real and the integration constraints are the actual work, not the framing around it.
About
How I work
I work best on engagements where the goal is concrete and the surface is well-defined: an integration spec, a published standard, an undocumented codebase to understand and migrate, a defined functional requirement to deliver against. I’m not a fast-onboarding generalist who absorbs a team’s tribal knowledge in two weeks; I’m a careful contractor who goes deep in the systems I’m responsible for and produces something that works in production. Most of my engagements run six to twelve months and end with the system handed over in better shape than I found it.
What I value in an engagement
Bounded scope and clear deliverables. Direct contracts over multi-layered intermediary arrangements. Long-form work over short break-fix gigs, because the systems I work on take real time to internalize. A delivery team that thinks together rather than handing artifacts over a wall. Honest conversations about what I will and won’t take on, up front, rather than late-stage disappointments. Clients who want a senior engineer to ship things, not a consultant to produce a deck.
I’m András Hummer, an independent senior back-end engineer based in Budapest. I work with European clients in regulated industries — payments, banking, energy — on integration and modernization problems where the difficulty isn’t shipping more features, it’s getting the existing systems to behave correctly under real constraints.