Chief Technology Officer in Berlin

• 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.

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

• Development and rollout 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 increase efficiency and integrate smoothly into existing business software

• Founded the online education company CareerFoundry in 2013.
• Built the first version of the product and grew it to €25M yearly revenue, 150 employees, over 1000 human teachers.
• Launched an AI tutoring service, raised €10M investment, and managed a board of international investors.

• 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

• 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

• 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)

• 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