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Hire an outstanding Chief Technology Officer in Berlin matched in minutes from over 15.000 CVs with the power of AI.

Access elite fractional CTOs, interim technology leaders, and VP of Engineering specialists who drive system architecture, scale cloud infrastructures, and lead agile development teams. Find vetted, available freelance professionals tailored to your precise tech stack and business goals.

About the role

Strategic Leadership in the Berlin Tech Ecosystem

Berlin is a global hub for fast-scaling startups and established enterprises undergoing digital transformation. A freelance Chief Technology Officer brings the seasoned leadership required to navigate this competitive landscape. They align business strategy with technical execution, helping companies build scalable software products, modernize legacy systems, and implement robust cloud architectures. Whether launching an early-stage MVP or managing a complex migration, these experts provide the strategic direction needed to succeed.

Key Responsibilities and Technical Deliverables

  • Designing scalable, secure, and resilient system architectures
  • Defining the technology roadmap and selecting the optimal tech stack
  • Leading, mentoring, and scaling local and remote engineering teams
  • Implementing modern DevOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud infrastructure
  • Ensuring strict compliance with data privacy regulations like GDPR
  • Auditing existing codebases and technical processes to eliminate technical debt

Essential Skills and Technological Expertise

Top technology leaders possess a deep understanding of modern software engineering principles, cloud platform capabilities, and agile methodologies. They are highly proficient in orchestrating cloud environments such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform, and managing microservices architectures. Additionally, they bring hands-on experience with modern backend frameworks, database design, and automated testing. Beyond technical skills, they excel in stakeholder communication, risk management, and bridging the gap between developers and executive boards.

When to Bring in a Freelance CTO

Companies typically engage freelance technology leaders during critical transition phases where permanent hiring is too slow or unnecessary. This includes bridging leadership gaps between permanent hires, steering a company through a major pivot, or preparing for a significant funding round. For many Berlin-based organizations, hiring a fractional or interim expert provides immediate access to high-level strategic guidance without the long-term commitment of a permanent C-suite salary.

Meet FRATCH Chief Technology Officers

Sven L.

CTO | CIO | AI Product Engineer

Berlin

Last position:

Group CTO at 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.
Sven L.

Nune Isabekyan

Engineering Leader · Fractional CTO of OpsWorker

Berlin

Last position:

Fractional CTO at OpsWorker

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.

Nune Isabekyan

Jeet Pattanaik

Global SAP Program Manager

Berlin

Last position:

Global SAP Program Manager at Aldi Sued

  • 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
Jeet Pattanaik

Mathias Wilhelm

Development of an AI-driven social media automation for topic identification, text generation, and posting

Berlin

Last position:

Development of an AI-driven social media automation for topic identification, text generation, and posting

  • Optimization and automation of marketing activities across social media channels
  • Gathering requirements and the processes to be optimized
  • Developing an automation to identify the company's USPs for different marketing target groups
  • Building an algorithm to search for and identify relevant news
  • Implementing an algorithm to create and send social media posts
  • Designing and implementing the entire automation in Python
  • Creating a web application in AngularJS
  • Increasing the company's visibility through more and more targeted posts on social media channels
  • Used technologies: requirements management, stakeholder management, architecture decisions, NLP, LLM, transformers, Python, FastAPI
Mathias Wilhelm

Sven Krahn

Interim CTO / CTPO (Software-, Cloud- & AI-Transformation)

Berlin

Last position:

Technical Advisor / Assessment Lead (Product Delivery & AI-Transformation) at nexMart GmbH & Co. KG

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
Sven Krahn

Jan-M. Dimitrov

Shareholder & CTO

Berlin

Last position:

Shareholder & CTO at moema-espresso.com

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

Max Degterev

Tech Lead, Interim CTO/CPO

Berlin

Last position:

Tech Lead, Interim CTO/CPO at MatchDispatch

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

Max Degterev

Ryan O'shea

Product Manager / CTO

Berlin

Last position:

Product Manager / CTO at talent::digital GmbH

  • 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
Ryan O'shea

Michael Haizmann

Organizational Transformation Consultant

Berlin

Last position:

Organizational Transformation Consultant at Blacklane GmbH

  • 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.
Michael Haizmann

Danilo Freitas

Chief Technology Officer

Berlin

Last position:

Chief Technology Officer at VR Smart Guide

  • 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
Danilo Freitas

Uwe Sandner

CTO

Berlin

Last position:

CTO at finleap connect

  • 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)
Uwe Sandner

Luca Demmel

CTO & Co-Founder

Berlin

Last position:

CTO & Co-Founder at Lucent Data GmbH

  • 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
Luca Demmel

Maciej Tatarek

Independent Contractor

Berlin

Last position:

Independent Contractor at Tatarek Development GmbH

  • Offer AI consulting, architecture design, and application development services to businesses, delivering tailored solutions aligned with their unique needs and goals.
  • Specialize in enhancing information access through custom internal knowledge management and customer service solutions.
  • Develop scalable conversational text and voice assistants and copilots for seamless interactions.
  • Build and optimize MLOps and information extraction pipelines for efficient AI deployment.
  • Tech: Python • Javascript • LLM
Maciej Tatarek

Mark Mulder

CTO / Co-Founder

Berlin

Last position:

CTO / Co-Founder at Cyclinghero.cc

  • Full architecting, development of REST API and frontend using Express JS and NextJS
  • Responsible for all deployment and build workflows (AWS + CircleCI)
Mark Mulder

Marko Seeland

IT Consultant / Interim CTO / E-Commerce

Berlin

Last position:

Interim CTO and IT Consultant at Freelance

Marko Seeland

Discover over 15,000 top freelancers

Chief Technology Officers statistics

Typical experience

21 years

Average project duration

2.7 years

Certifications per freelancer

1

Top business areas

Information Technology, Product Development, Operations

Top industries

Information Technology, Professional Services, Retail

Most common languages

German, English, Spanish

Bachelor's degree or higher

92%

Master's degree or higher

38%

Doctorate

15%

Salary / Daily Rate Distribution

0 3 6 9 12
<€800 €800-1200 €1200-1600 €1600+

The chart shows how the daily rates of freelancers in this role are distributed, based on recent contracts on our platform. Each bar covers a rate range — its height shows how many freelancers charge within that range. Actual rates may vary depending on seniority level, experience, skill specialization, project complexity, and engagement length.

Average rates for Chief Technology Officers & Seniority distribution

Rates are based on recent contracts and do not include FRATCH margin.

1200
900
600
300
Rate comparison chart
Daily rate avg. 1140 €

The average daily rate is the mean of all daily rates from recent contracts of comparable freelancers on our platform.

1200
900
600
300
Rate comparison chart
Median rate 1000 €

The median daily rate is the middle value of all daily rates — half of comparable freelancers charge less, half charge more. Unlike the average, it is barely affected by outliers.

Actual rates may vary depending on seniority level, experience, skill specialization, project complexity, and engagement length.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Got questions? Learn key details about FRATCH right now

A freelance Chief Technology Officer provides strategic technical leadership, aligns engineering efforts with business goals, and oversees the development team. They audit existing architectures, define technology roadmaps, and make high-level decisions on tech stacks and infrastructure. Their goal is to ensure the technical foundation supports business growth efficiently.

While the Chief Technology Officer focuses heavily on the outward-facing technology strategy, architecture decisions, and long-term business alignment, the VP of Engineering typically concentrates on execution. The VP manages the day-to-day operations of the engineering department, handles people management, and ensures timely project delivery. In many agile organizations, these roles collaborate closely to balance strategy with execution.

A fractional CTO is ideal for early-stage startups that need strategic direction but do not yet require or have the budget for a full-time executive. This model allows founders to access senior technical expertise on a part-time basis to guide architecture choices, hire initial developers, or prepare for fundraising. It provides maximum flexibility while keeping overhead costs low during crucial growth phases.

An effective interim CTO should have a strong background in modern cloud infrastructures, system design, and software engineering. They must be comfortable with agile project management frameworks and possess the ability to quickly assess and optimize complex codebases. Strong knowledge of cybersecurity principles and scalable database management is also highly critical.

A freelance CTO usually operates in a hybrid capacity, combining remote strategic work with key on-site meetings at the Berlin office. They run sprint planning sessions, lead architecture reviews, and maintain open communication channels through tools like Slack and Jira. This approach ensures they remain closely aligned with the local product and engineering teams.

Yes, an external technology leader is often brought in specifically to prepare a company for due diligence during investment rounds. They clean up technical documentation, explain the system architecture to technical auditors, and demonstrate the scalability of the product. Their objective expertise adds significant credibility when presenting to venture capitalists and angel investors.

The quality of an interim technology specialist is best measured by their track record of successfully delivered software projects and stabilized infrastructures. Look for candidates who demonstrate strong leadership communication, quick onboarding capabilities, and clear methodology for reducing technical debt. References from previous executive boards and lead engineers are also highly valuable indicators.

In Germany, a Chief Technology Officer must ensure that all systems and data workflows strictly comply with GDPR regulations. They oversee data hosting decisions, implement robust security protocols, and establish clear policies for data access and storage. This is particularly vital for companies operating in highly regulated fields like fintech, healthtech, and enterprise software.

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Philipp Thomaschewski

FRATCH CEO

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