Sascha Metzger-Senior eCommerce & AI Engineer

Re-platforming an e-commerce shop to a microservice architecture

• Goal: Replace an outdated Shopware system with a scalable, future-proof solution based on microservices and a headless architecture.
• Led a full architecture consulting process and defined the microservice boundaries based on a headless architecture with commercetools as PIM/OMS and Next.js as the frontend solution.
• Developed and integrated several decentralized services (e.g. internationalization, personalization).
• Took over the configuration of key third-party systems such as Contentstack and Algolia.
• Built a stable cloud infrastructure on Google Cloud with monitoring via Grafana.

Technologies: commercetools, Next.js, Contentstack, Algolia, Google Cloud, Grafana, TypeScript, Shopware

Development of an international e-commerce platform

• Goal: Build a high-performance, user-friendly and international e-commerce platform.
• Defined a scalable, performant and maintainable software architecture that formed the basis for the platform's international expansion.
• Chose a best-of-breed technology stack that enabled the development of a top-class shop and reduced the development effort for new features by 30%.
• Ensured seamless integration of critical third-party systems (PIM, CRM, ERP) to support end-to-end business processes and a single source of truth.
• Implemented comprehensive tracking and analytics tools for continuous performance monitoring and optimization of the customer journey.

Technologies: React.js, Next.js, commerceTools, Algolia, Salesforce, Heroku, CI/CD, PHP, Google Analytics

AI-powered personalization and customer data platform in e-commerce

• Goal: Replace static content with a dynamic, AI-based personalization strategy to increase relevance for users and automate marketing processes.
• Designed and built a customer data platform to aggregate and merge customer and analytics data from distributed sources.
• Implemented automated categorization of customer profiles as the basis for personalized content and product recommendations in the Shopware frontend.
• Developed a semantic similarity algorithm based on Python and OpenAI to calculate product and content similarities from user profiles.
• Built the technical connection to retail media platforms to control external ad placements along the customer journey.

Technologies: Shopware 6, Python 3, OpenAI, Elasticsearch, PHP, Symfony, Twig

Shopware tracking & consent architecture (GDPR) for 4 online shops

• Goal: Build a unified, GDPR-compliant tracking infrastructure across multiple shops with central consent management across several Shopware instances.
• Defined a comprehensive tracking guide and developed a modular architecture compatible across multiple Shopware versions.
• GDPR-compliant integration of Usercentrics and Adobe Launch through a central tag manager.
• Complete tracking setup (page, order, product, user) incl. partner-specific tracking (Emarsys, Channelpilot and others).
• Detailed event and error tracking for proactive identification of technical drop-offs.

Technologies: Shopware, Adobe Analytics, Usercentrics, Tag Manager, PHP, MySQL, GDPR

AI/LLM search engine with RAG and hybrid search (Python, Elasticsearch)

• Goal: Build an AI-powered search engine with RAG architecture and hybrid search to accurately match service providers from over 500,000 company records.
• Developed an automated data pipeline (web scraping + LLM) that continuously crawls company data and converts it into structured formats using LLMs.
• Implemented a RAG workflow including vectorization for semantic search to improve search accuracy and relevance.
• Configured and fine-tuned Elasticsearch for hybrid search (vector + keyword search).
• End-to-end development of backend API, frontend and deployment on live servers.

Technologies: Python, FastAPI, Elasticsearch, LLM, RAG, React, Docker, web scraping

AI/computer vision system (Python, ML) – object detection under difficult conditions

• Goal: Develop an AI-based detection system with reliable performance even in rain, fog, snow and darkness.
• Built and annotated a large training dataset including difficult conditions.
• Trained a YOLO-based object detection model; carried out systematic error analysis and improved data quality and preprocessing.
• Aligned with stakeholders through regular status updates.

Technologies: Python, Machine Learning, TensorFlow, PyTorch, YOLO, OpenCV