Akos Szente
Leader, builder and former fintech co-founder with a strong product mindset and keen interest in usability, security and privacy. Enjoys creating an environment where individuals can live up to their potential and are motivated to build things of high value.
Engineering Manager
Babylon is a digital health service provider that combines AI technology with the medical expertise of humans, delivering full access to healthcare, including personalised health assessments, treatment advice and face-to-face appointments with a doctor 24/7.
Senior Software Engineer + Technical Product Manager
While working as a senior IC I picked up product management responsibilities to set direction and priorities for the team, engage with other stakeholders and map out requirements, and report back to leadership with regular updates, including a 2-minute live presentation for C-level leadership every month.
Senior Software Engineer
- Moved Babylon's authentication platform from stateful, opaque tokens to stateless, JWT-based authentication with zero downtime and full backwards compatibility.
- Extracted role-based access control functionality from Babylon's Ruby monolith into a sustainable microservice and implemented complex authorisation constraints.
- Built and maintained internal microservices and pipelines to support the declarative configuration of the authentication and authorisation infrastructure.
- Helped move Babylon's mobile apps from custom authentication to OpenID Connect.
- Added support for Sign in with Apple and other identity providers across the platform.
- Provided internal developer support and incident response.
- OpenID Connect
- OAuth 2.0
- Authentication
- Authorization
- GDPR & Consents
- Scalability
- JWT
- Microservices
- Service Mesh
- Onboarding Experience
- Distributed Platform
Co-Founder, Software Engineer
Payment Courier was born as a simple solution to a common problem: Splitting payments online. Sharing costs online is tough, whether it’s buying festival tickets or purchasing a new TV. The current payment methods are built on outdated logic - one person pays and waits for everyone else to reimburse them. With Payment Courier, consumers can simply share a link where recipients can easily pay their share directly to the merchant.
One needs to wear many hats at a startup. My main responsibilities included:
- Developing software components of Payment Courier.
- User experience and interaction design. Prototyping and user research.
- Copywriting (both for the UI and for marketing).
- Managing web and media appearances; designing and ordering company merchandise.
- Representing Payment Courier at fintech conferences and participating in startup pitch contests on stage, such as at MoneyConf 2018 and Money20/20 2018.
Payment Courier is a UK company.
- HTML / SASS
- Javascript
- ASP.NET MVC
- UX
- Sketch
- InVision
- AWS
- Payments
Full Stack Developer, Business Consultant
Worked with three fellow developers in a Scrum team on supporting, maintaining and extending the IT infrastructure of a medium-sized business. Monitored and periodically reviewed company procedures to propose ways of improvement through automation and software.
- Maintained and extended the company's Yii MVC–based monolithic web application. Developed all new components as loosely coupled services and incrementally extracted existing components to prepare for a future move to a microservice architecture.
- Proposed and developed several internal iOS applications and their respective APIs to handle specific business scenarios.
- Performed an initial security audit to reveal and patch vulnerabilities. Iteratively added features like multi-factor authentication and login attempt notifications to improve overall security.
- Performed UX research to uncover usability issues. Overhauled the most important user journeys based on research data and evaluated new design via user studies and A/B testing.
- Developed iOS and Android apps for company promotions.
- Communicated directly with employees. Held on-site seminars to introduce changes.
- iOS / tvOS
- AWS
- PCI DSS
- Braintree
- Payment Vaults
- PHP
- HTML / CSS / JS
- SQL
Lead Software Developer
(Junior until mid 2015)I started working for E-Group during my gap year as a full-time trainee, and kept working for them as a full-time developer until 2016, remotely during term time and on-site whenever possible.
- Lead a scrum team of 5 as we modernised a VoIP sign language interpretation system aimed at the deaf and hard of hearing. The service provides real-time online sign language interpretation from a phone app via a video connection, billed by the minute. We refactored the system's architecture to make it more resilient and scalable, and replaced major components to improve its reliability.
- Developed the iOS and web client apps of the same service.
- Worked on a variety of smaller projects over the years.
- Java
- Python
- iOS
- Android
- SIP / VOIP
- TLS
- SQL
- Azure
- Embedded
Thesis Project
Authreq - turning iPhone into a hardware key
Authreq is a proposed scheme that allows users to prove their identity to a web service in a novel and intuitive way: by using their iPhone as a possession factor during authentication.
The app generates a pair of private and public keys with Secure Enclave to issue and verify digital signatures with. The private key always remains inside Secure Enclave - there is no way to acquire the raw key even if the device's kernel is compromised. Secure Enclave verifies the user's identity locally via Touch ID or Face ID before issuing each signature.
External service providers can send challenges to the user's device via Authreq whenever necessary, such as during login attempts. These challenges appear as push notifications. Users can sign these challenges with Authreq and send the digital signature back to the service provider. The service provider can then validate the signature with the user's public key, effectively proving that they allowed the transaction.
The scheme's usability and perceived security has been verified via a user study with 30 participants. Authreq was found to be more usable than all other popular 2FA solutions that it was compared with.
My thesis, the source code, and a live demo are available on the project's website.
- Usable Security
- 2FA
- iOS
- Swift
- PKI
- E-Signature
- REST
- Push Notifications
Education
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🎓 Master in Science, Software Engineeringwith Honours in the First DegreeUniversity of GlasgowGlasgow, United Kingdom
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🎓 Bachelor of Science, Software Engineeringwith Honours in the First DegreeUniversity of GlasgowGlasgow, United Kingdom
Languages & Tools
Human Languages
- 🇬🇧English
- 🇭🇺Hungarian
- 🇮🇹Italian (Novice)
Leisure
- 💻Trying new tech
- 🏋️♂️Keeping myself fit
- 🚗Driving