Sven L.-CTO | CIO | AI Product Engineer
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Experience
Group CTO
apo.com Group
- Situation: Inherited a patchwork of aging proprietary systems accumulated over 20+ years — custom-built shop, pharmacy operations, logistics, and product data management. No standardization, no automation, no modern delivery practices.
- Team: Found a centralistic hero culture with one manager handling more than 20 direct reports. Removed the bottleneck, replaced low performers, brought resistant team members back on track or managed them out. Hired fresh talent that brought new energy and capability.
- Delivery: Unified nine brands into a single platform, improving delivery speed by roughly 10x and eliminating cross-brand inconsistencies. Launched a new mobile app that tripled mobile revenue share within 12 months.
- AI: Implemented AI coding tools across development departments. Continuously working on trainings and knowledge sharing for developers. Delivered analytics and agentic automation for customer care inbound emails, and initiated agentic call automation.
- Operations: Introduced automated build and deployment pipelines, initiated cloud migration, and brought the core pharmacy system onto a maintainable, current foundation.
- Governance: Took back project prioritization from ad-hoc business demands by introducing transparent capacity planning — the biggest “no” enforced and the most impactful change for the organization.
Group CTO & Managing Director
Ingenio Europe
- Situation: Classic post-M&A difficulties — two cash-cow brands running on a 20-year-old legacy platform, additional acquired apps on separate systems, nine native apps with duplicated effort, and billing logic embedded in the accounting system.
- Platform unification: Replaced the entire legacy landscape with a single unified platform and one multi-brand mobile app. Eliminated years of accumulated duplication and fragmentation.
- Team restructuring: Built a dedicated team for the new platform. Ring-fenced the legacy team to keep the business running, then managed their transition out. Reduced engineering from 85 to 33 FTE through consolidation and automation.
- Cost reduction: Shrank the infrastructure operations team from nine to two FTE through automation. Cut hosting costs from €800K/year to €120K/year (–85%) through cloud migration.
- Works council & exit: Engaged the works council early and negotiated openly. Framed restructuring around giving remaining employees a viable future. Successfully prepared the company for acquisition by a US-based Ingenio in 2022.
CTO (interim)
SMACC / Hypatos
- Situation: Full-service bookkeeping company aiming for high automation by applying custom AI models. Core system was slow, inflexible, and built on the wrong foundation. The AI product intended as the future was stuck in the lab with no path to production.
- Business pivot: Transformed the company from a services business into a focused product company. Worked with the AI team to bring the document extraction product from research prototype to market-ready — which became the company’s core asset.
- Platform rebuild: Replaced the legacy core with a modern, enterprise-ready system. Eliminated fragile dependencies blocking scalability.
- Scaling: Founded a second development office in Warsaw to accelerate delivery. Helped to create the spin-off Hypatos as a standalone AI company, preserving the most valuable IP.
CTO (interim)
Lyke (Rocket Internet)
- Managed remote teams across Indonesia and Germany during strategic evaluation of team location and market viability.
- Built local product and engineering capability in Indonesia to reduce dependency on expensive Berlin-based resources.
CTO & Managing Director
Discavo / Hipaway
- Hotel meta-search engine.
- Built a platform that could handle peak traffic from prime-time TV advertising without downtime.
- Integrated more than 30 commercial partners.
- Successfully acquired by Pro7Sat1 group.
Founding CTO
Home24
- Joined as first technical hire at what became Germany’s leading online furniture retailer.
- Built the e-commerce platform, integrated ERP and logistics, and scaled the engineering team from zero to 40.
CTO
Avenso AG (Lumas / WhiteWall)
- Rescued a failing ERP integration that was blocking order fulfilment.
- Built the WhiteWall online photo lab platform from scratch.
Teamlead Feature Development
StudiVZ (VZnet)
- Scaled the development team from five to 50 in 90 days.
- Led the complete re-architecture of the platform.
Software Engineer, Billing
1&1 Internet SE
- Built and ran billing systems processing over 120,000 invoices daily across European and US markets for one of Germany’s largest internet providers.
Industry Experience
See where this freelancer has spent most of their professional time.
Experienced in Information Technology, Retail, Telecommunication, Banking and Finance, Tourism, and Healthcare.
Business Area Experience
See which departments and functions this freelancer has contributed to most.
Experienced in Information Technology, Product Development, Operations, Finance, Logistics, and Strategy.
Summary
I fix legacy software and rebuild the teams around it. Over 15 years in CTO roles I have repeatedly walked into organizations running on aging, proprietary systems — untangled the grown structures, modernized the platforms, and restructured engineering from hero culture into scalable, autonomous units. All while keeping the revenue engine running. I am comfortable saying no, negotiating with works councils, managing out low performers, and making the hard calls that turn a cost center back into a competitive advantage. My track record: cutting team sizes by 60% through smart consolidation (not blind layoffs), reducing hosting costs by 85%, accelerating delivery speed by 10x through platform unification, and driving successful exits. I bring patience for the long game and urgency for quick wins.
Skills
Assess First, Then Act. Full Inventory Of Systems, Teams, Dependencies And Cost Drivers Before Any Roadmap.
Quick Wins Fund The Long Game. Identify What Can Be Fixed In Weeks To Build Credibility And Momentum While Planning The Larger Transformation.
Keep The Lights On While Rebuilding. Legacy Systems Stay Running And Generating Revenue While New Capabilities Take Over Piece By Piece.
Teams Before Technology. The Wrong Team Structure Will Defeat Any Architecture. I Restructure Reporting Lines, Break Up Single-Person Dependencies, Remove Low Performers, And Hire Targeted New Talent — Always In Close Coordination With The Business Leaders And Works Councils.
Transparent Prioritization. Business Leads Get Visibility Into Engineering Capacity And Trade-Offs. No Black Box It. No Hidden Backlogs.
Legacy Renewal: Assessment, Strangler-Pattern Migration, Platform Consolidation, Cost Reduction
Team Restructuring: Org Design, Performance Management, Works Council Negotiation, Hiring
Delivery Improvement: Automated Pipelines, Cloud Migration, Release Acceleration, Monitoring
M&A Integration: Tech Due Diligence, Platform Consolidation, Post-Merger Team Integration
Governance: Transparent Capacity Planning, Stakeholder Alignment, Prioritization Frameworks
Hands-On Capability: Can Read And Debug Legacy Code, Evaluate Architecture, And Validate Technical Decisions — Not Just Manage From A Distance
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