Reinholds Bunde
Engineering @ Home
London, UK
I build customer-facing systems for companies that need reliability, speed, and pragmatic engineering.
Currently, I lead engineering at Home, splitting my time between product, JVM backends, distributed systems, and platform reliability.
Previously, I scaled payments infrastructure at Zopa and Bó, built telemetry pipelines at Forter, and led engineering growth at KatKin.
Side-Projects & Tools
Contractor Tax Estimator
Featured • 4k+ UsersA detailed calculator for UK limited company IT contractors. Estimates corporate tax, personal dividend tax, and models optimal salary-to-dividend strategies.
Salary Tax
UK payroll modeling for permanent employment. Simulates income tax, National Insurance, and pension contributions.
Mortgage
Calculate monthly payments, interest amortization, and model the impact of voluntary overpayments.
Compound Growth
Visualize long-term savings projections to see how compound interest affects accumulation.
Removals
A simple spatial planning estimator to figure out box counts and overall volume for home packing.
Resources
A plain collection of reference websites, technical bookmarks, and development resources.
Current Focus & Interests
I am currently optimizing for operational simplicity, highly responsive feedback loops, and workflows that reduce accidental complexity in small engineering teams.
Recent rabbit holes: Practical LLM integration to automate repetitive toil (rather than adding maintenance burden), lightweight state machines on SQL databases, and building deterministic CI/CD pipelines.
What I value: Clear ownership, systems designed to survive real users, and small, high-agency teams shipping code quickly.
Selected Writing & Thoughts
Why I Prefer http4k
It models HTTP as a pure function: HttpHandler = (Request) -> Response. No magic annotations, instant boot, and trivial unit testing.
AI in Real Pipelines
Excellent for eliminating boilerplate, but risky for system layout. Use AI to remove mechanical toil, not engineering judgment, and back it with deterministic tests.
Premature Platform Engineering
Until coordination is a bottleneck, internal platforms are a costly distraction. Prefer simple deployments, boring tech, and maximum product focus.
Engineering Principles & Mindset
Simplicity Over Cleverness
I believe the best system design is the one you can fully hold in your head. Avoid premature abstraction, keep telemetry robust from day one, and favor boring, well-understood technologies that ship fast and stay up.
Product-led Engineering
Great software isn't just about elegant code; it's about solving real human problems. I work closely with product and design, treating engineering decisions as product trade-offs where speed-to-feedback is a primary metric.
Systems Should Be Debuggable
A system you cannot observe is a liability in production. I prioritize clear telemetry, predictable logging, and structured tracing from day one so that debugging is science, not luck.
Prefer Boring Technology
Keep your innovation tokens focused on your unique business problems, not your database or server framework. Choose proven, mature, and boring stacks to keep the operational burden low.
