Chief Technology Officer in Berlin

OpsWorker turns Kubernetes alerts into root-cause analyses, on top of the monitoring a team already runs. I lead the technical side: the agent architecture, the AWS infrastructure it runs on (fully inside EU regions), and the engineering decisions behind it, read-only in the cluster by default, human in the loop for judgment. The stack underneath: Amazon Bedrock and Bedrock AgentCore, agents built with the Strands Agents SDK, the Claude and OpenAI APIs, and the Kubernetes API.

• Insurance service provider*

Challenge: Business-critical documents were processed through external OCR providers, with ongoing costs, dependency, and data privacy risks for sensitive insurance data.

Implementation:

• Architecture and production implementation of an on-premise OCR solution with full data ownership
• Methods for recognizing document structures as the basis for automated further processing
• ML-, NLP-, and LLM/VLM-based information extraction, especially from invoices and quotations

Success: Replaced external providers: full data ownership, GDPR-compliant processing, and 75% lower recurring OCR costs per year

Used technologies: Python, Docker, Microservices, FastAPI, PyTorch, Torchvision, MongoDB, MySQL

Assessment of the product, delivery, and AI organization with a realignment of operational excellence, target architecture, and AI-first operating model

Initial situation: The product and delivery organization showed structural weaknesses in efficiency, control, and collaboration. In addition, there was no clear target architecture for AI-driven product and organizational development. At leadership level, transparency about roles, responsibilities, and operational performance was limited.

Responsibility & approach:

• Analysis of the existing product, delivery, and organizational structures with regard to processes, governance, and controllability
• Evaluation of architecture and platform in terms of scalability, future readiness, and AI integration
• Development of a target picture for an AI-first product and delivery operating model
• Derivation of concrete measures to improve operational excellence and collaboration
• Sparring with the leadership team on structured organizational development

Results & impact:

• Creation of transparency around structural bottlenecks, performance, and decision logic
• Development of a target structure for a scalable AI-first product and delivery setup
• Improved decision-making ability and controllability at leadership level
• Creation of a solid foundation for downstream transformation measures
• Definition of concrete levers to improve efficiency, collaboration, and time to market

• Pioneered first enterprise AI-SAP integration at ALDI SÜD, deploying AI-driven automation within one of retail's largest SAP S/4HANA programs, eliminating 50% of manual pre-cycle validation time and establishing replicable automation framework across 11 countries
• Led end-to-end SAP project lifecycle management for implementations across SAP S/4HANA and Manhattan Systems, supporting 7,300+ ALDI SÜD locations globally across Europe and Australia
• Served as primary executive liaison to C-level stakeholders across 11 countries for strategic SAP transformation programs
• Orchestrated automation, performance, and volume testing for critical releases, maintaining 99.9% system SLA compliance during peak retail periods
• Managed cross-functional international teams of 15+ specialists, delivering projects 20% faster than industry benchmarks
• Standardized SAP processes across 11 countries as part of one of retail's largest SAP implementations
• Directly managed €2M budget with 98% allocation accuracy across 12 concurrent projects
• Reduced SAP S/4HANA migration costs by 18% through strategic vendor contract renegotiations and optimization

• Maintenance and improvement of Magento-based e-commerce platform to handle double the number of transactions after the company takeover

I worked on automating cold outreach.

• Developed a queue architecture to support the parallel execution of large volumes of background tasks.
• Integrated multiple email delivery providers.
• Implemented an LLM-based data enrichment process.

Technologies: TypeScript, React, Node.js, Next.js, Drizzle ORM, PostgreSQL, Next-Auth, JWT, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, CloudFlare, Traefik, Groq, Jest, Figma

Advising and leading technology organizations through periods of critical transition, focusing on strategic realignment, team stabilization, and executive hiring

Key Engagements:

Wentronic GmbH - Interim Head of IT (10 months) International manufacturer & distributor of electronics accessories; >€100M revenue

• Audited tech organization and identified critical gaps in leadership structure
• Hired four senior roles including a new Head of IT
• Acted as Interim Head of IT to stabilize transition

IMAGO stock&people GmbH - Interim Fractional CTO (4 months)

Germany’s leading photo agency and Europe’s largest sports-content provider

• Analyzed tech architecture and organizational structure during critical phase
• Supported CTO selection process from requirements definition through final hiring

• Development and launch of a browser-based platform for camera streaming, augmented reality (AR), and visual computing
• Device-independent camera streaming for smartphones, tablets, desktop PCs, as well as VR and AR headsets
• Ensuring GDPR-compliant hosting in Open Telekom Cloud and other sovereign cloud providers
• Intuitive visual and collaborative features to boost efficiency and seamlessly integrate into existing enterprise software

• B2B Learning & Development platform focusing on gamified skills development
• Owned and prioritised product roadmap for enterprise e-learning platform
• Led cross-functional delivery (engineering, design, sales, marketing)
• Delivered redesigned enterprise UI (“cockpit”) enabling improved customer data visibility
• Increased content production output from 1 item / 2 weeks to 2 items in the same timeframe
• Contributed production-level code (React, Java, Postgres) to accelerate key deliverables
• Assumed CTO-level responsibilities before and after insolvency (Jan 2025), ensuring product continuity under new IP ownership
• Maintained delivery momentum during resource reduction and organisational restructuring

• Coaching leadership and teams in evolving their ‘ways of working’ through strategic planning habits, OKRs, and operational governance.
• Fostering a modern company culture.
• Integrating the tech organization with the company-wide ‘ways of working’ to ensure maximum effectiveness and alignment.
• Providing strategic product consulting.

• Introduced a serverless/event-driven platform, boosting deployment frequency from 3 to 40 per month
• Implemented an LLM-based fraud-detection proof of concept that flagged 92 % of suspicious transactions
• Built performance and DORA metrics dashboards adopted by the C-suite

• Responsible for the digitalization of complex financial processes by leveraging AI capabilities and stabilizing a technical team with strong engineering culture
• Member of the company's senior management alongside the CEO and COO, defined and executed the P&L strategy
• Rebooted the engineering team by replacing underperforming people, adding flexible engineering profiles for experimental projects, supporting the business, and restructuring the P&L by freezing financially unproductive scopes
• Actively supported fundraising by deep-diving into financial structures and validating the business rationale to focus on strategic goals
• Freezing products with no relevant revenue streams
• Prioritizing the pivot toward data products
• Renegotiating vendors
• Cleaning up unproductive SaaS
• Reorganizing the tech org chart into a flexible team to reduce committed cash burn
• Created data and AI teams and introduced AI specialists who produced core business solutions such as innovative prediction models for financial scoring and digitalization of the banking process
• Created and executed fintech compliance requirements in accordance with ZAG/BaFin
• Responsible for creating and executing a data-driven view to leverage financial services based on transnational data for SMEs' financial risk evaluation and management
• Formed first-level engineering leadership by creating cross-functional teams and introducing platform teams for speed and reliability
• Created a lean strategy for implementing a scalable microservices-based architecture using event-driven design and migrated existing projects from bare metal to GCP with CI/CD pipeline

• Leading the technology and engineering team. Responsible for all engineering, IT strategy, and IT operations (75 FTE in 4 countries, 8M budget)
• Leading the technology part in acquisitions, financing rounds, and post-merger integrations
• Providing bank connectivity via PSD2, scraping, and premium APIs in several markets (EU and MENA)
• Offering Account Information Services (AIS), Payment Initiation Services (PIS), and data enrichment (categorisation, contract recognition, insights, risk indicators)
• Building several complete B2B2C white label neo banking solutions based on external core banking
• Running the market leading account and portfolio switching service
• Operating a private hybrid cloud in a regulated environment across several datacentres (bare-metal, AWS, GCP, client side)

• Built a warehouse native customer data platform from scratch
• Successfully onboarded the first customer
• Built the first engineering team of 3 engineers
• Raised 1M€ in venture capital