Chief Technology Officers in Germany

Support for Transformation Projects:

• Expert CTO advisory and enterprise architecture consulting for several short-term transformation projects, ensuring measurable improvements in project outcomes and technical business alignment.
• Supporting strategic IT initiatives for diverse clients, driving digital transformation and optimizing technology operations to increase business value and operational efficiency.

Think tank on AI

• Restructuring & interim management: Leading and stabilizing R&D organizations during periods of change and growth, particularly during strategic realignment, M&A or to bridge leadership vacancies
• R&D operating models: Assessing and redesigning devel...

Through Sourcegarden GmbH, ongoing engagement. Transitioning software development to agentic development in phases, from setup and pilots through transformation and handover.

• Member of the leadership team

• 40 people across several international sites in my teams.

• Technical ownership of the shareholder's buy-and-build strategy: assessment of target companies and their subsequent integration.

• Platform, cloud infrastructure, information security and the engineering organisation.

"Reasoning Models: From LLM Foundations to NOC Automation."

Available for interim and contract mandates

Details & Responsibilities:

Responsible for ACS Datacenter operations at all locations for over 10 years. This includes more than 3.500 virtual systems for over 100 Datacenter customers with + 20.000 users worldwide. The associated annual revenue volume is 7 Mio. Euro.

Introduction of an HCI platform to replace the previous “Legacy” platform. Project volume 2 Mio. Euro

About the company:

ACS Solutions GmbH stands for innovative and pioneering structures in information technology. Holistic consulting and individual, future-proof solutions for medium-sized companies. Datacenter and Managed Service Provider with three Datacenter locations in Germany and more than 40 employees.

• Self-employed · Berlin, Germany
• Co-founded the company and own the entire technical side: product architecture, backend, frontend, infrastructure and operations.
• Designed and built the Automated Booking System (ABS) as well as the core platform and payment logic.
• Development of AI-powered SaaS products, from architecture through backend and frontend to production operation.
• Technical consulting on product architecture, data protection and permissible automation.
• Building, running and monetising my own API products for AI agents, each available as a REST interface and as an MCP server.
• Full ownership of architecture, infrastructure, billing, legal texts and go-to-market.

• Interim mandate to define the IT Service Strategy 2026, stabilize leadership and organizational structures, and prepare the platform and service organization for scaling. Focus on management clarity, stakeholder alignment and customer orientation in a volatile environment.

• Strongly technical predecessor role with limited leadership and management impact

• High turnover and increasing use of junior consultants

• Missing SLAs with key service providers (including BTC, Bechtle) as well as missing KPI and reporting structures

• Missing strategic framework and inconsistent communication with stakeholders

• Overall responsibility for the organizational unit, budget, providers and strategic prioritization

• Leadership of an organization staffed predominantly with external consultants (including PwC, Wavestone, Accenture)

• Responsibility for leadership stabilization and management effectiveness

• Close cooperation with executive management and the advisory board as well as with key stakeholders in a sensitive environment

• Development and communication of a clear IT Strategy 2026 as a framework for management and teams

• Restoration of leadership focus and decision-making clarity in a fragmented organization

• Noticeable improvement in how leadership and communication were perceived by stakeholders

• Introduction of a clear prioritization logic to reduce operational friction

• Initial stabilization of the organization within a deliberately short interim period

Tech & Methods: Azure Cloud, Service Governance, Stakeholder Management, Provider Steering, Leadership Frameworks

• The shortage of skilled workers affects many companies in the DACH region.
• HireOnFire has made it its mission to move the employee search of medium-sized companies away from traditional job portals and toward social media channels and search engines.
• With a mix of social recruiting and performance marketing, we reach target groups where they spend their time.

• 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.

• Solo MVP in 3 Months -- PRD to SRS to production: 12 Django apps + React SPA with JWT auth, delivered ahead of schedule.
• Real-Time Backend -- Django REST APIs, WebSocket channels, Celery + Redis queues, role-based access across 4 user roles.
• Multi-Tenant SaaS -- Isolated tenant provisioning with Kubernetes, Helm, and FastAPI -- subdomain live in under one minute.
• CI/CD & Infrastructure -- 5 Hetzner servers, 3 repos, branch-specific GitHub Actions auto-deploy; Dockerized full stack.
• Team Leadership -- Hired and led 3 developers across 3 countries; closed 450+ Linear tickets in 9 months.
• Full Product Scope -- Courses, quizzes, PDF certificates, user imports, real-time notifications, analytics, and subscription management.
• Live Product -- Published at iqrew.de; app complete, SaaS in final testing, market launch imminent.
• SSO & Security -- Cross-platform SSO with single-use tokens, server-to-server validation, tenant isolation, and HTTPS auto-renewal.
• Test Strategy -- 3-layer pyramid: pytest, Jest/RTL + MSW, Playwright E2E with factory fixtures and role-based auth across all roles.
• Performance Engineering -- Locust stress tests identified N+1 bottlenecks (60s timeouts); optimized to sub-250ms at 50 concurrent users, 0% failures.
• Stripe SaaS Billing -- Stripe webhook-driven upgrades, automated tenant provisioning, self-service onboarding from checkout to live tenant.

Project: Defect Generation on Test-Bench Images of Metal Surfaces Environment: Automated Visual Inspection (AVI), Metallurgy & Manufacturing

• Objective & Implementation: Designed, architected, and trained Generative Adversarial Networks (Pix2PixHD / SPADE) for image-to-image transformation. Targeted generation of synthetic material defects (e.g., cracks, inclusions, scale) on rough metal surfaces under real test-bench lighting conditions for privacy-compliant and efficient dataset expansion (data augmentation).
• Technical Design: Implemented robust Generative AI and computer vision pipelines in Python and PyTorch. Used semantic segmentation approaches for mask-controlled defect synthesis and subsequent evaluation with EfficientDet object detection models.
• Business Impact: Massive dataset upscaling (10x) without time-consuming and costly physical test-bench runs, while significantly improving the detection performance of automated inspection systems.

Technologies & Skills Used: Python | PyTorch | SPADE | Pix2PixHD | EfficientDet | Machine Learning | Semantic Segmentation | Computer Vision