Tech Lead in Germany

Maturing their API practices on both a business and technology level. My role covers strategy, architecture, developer advocacy as well as hands-on software engineering, enabling both technical teams and business leadership to adopt and act on API-centric principles effectively. Coincidentally, we also establish GitOps, DX and platform best practices with this project.

Highlights:

• Aligning executives with the initiative by clarifying strategy, replacing misconceptions and myths with facts, clarifying the value of existing assets and enabling informed decision-making
• Formulating a way forward for API Lifecycle Management at OTTO
• Driving platform progress and fostering developer engagement by hands-on engineering work towards strategic goals

API Lifecycle Management, Team Topologies, Organizational Evolution, Regulatory, Platform Advocate, Developer Platform, Communities of Practice, Terraform, Kotlin, Kafka, Kong, WSO2, Apigee, Gravitee, Backstage, AsyncAPI, OpenAPI, API Design, AWS, React, Node.js, TypeScript, Redocly, reactive programming, CDC, Golang, Gin, GitOps, DX (developer experience), stakeholder management, roadmaps, workshops, discovery.

Stabilization of an Azure/.NET landscape in live operation.

• Architecture, DevOps, and operational readiness; technical decisions under time pressure
• Azure DevOps, monitoring, ETL/ELT, cloud security, FinOps, and data-mesh-related topics

Technologies: Azure DevOps, .NET, CI/CD, monitoring, FinOps

Built an international e-commerce platform for a multi-vendor marketplace for digital assets from scratch. Designed and operated cloud native architectures at enterprise scale.

• Designed and operated a highly scalable microservice and serverless architecture
• Built the complete cloud infrastructure with Terraform + AWS CDK in AWS
• Provisioned ECS/EKS clusters (Fargate), Application Load Balancers (reverse proxy), and Lambda functions
• Observability & tracing with CloudWatch, DataDog, Prometheus, and Grafana
• End-to-end setup with DataDog (formerly AWS CloudWatch), Prometheus, and custom Grafana dashboards
• Integration of advanced metrics (including ORM mapper) and distributed tracing with Jaeger
• Robust backup and disaster recovery strategies
• RDS Postgres backups and hourly snapshots
• Read-only, asynchronously synchronized replicas with automated master failover in emergencies
• Minute-level rollback capability through versioned Docker images on ECS and Git-based CI/CD pipelines
• Created CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions for automated multi-stage deployments (Dev, Testing, Prod)
• Integrated Stripe for international payment processing
• Built a marketplace payment system with multiple parties and payout routines
• Used Algolia for high-performance real-time search of digital assets on the platform
• Federation of services with GraphQL and Hasura
• Later migration to GraphQL Mesh
• Test Driven Development (TDD) - unit, integration, and E2E testing with Jest, Vitest, and Playwright
• Used Next.js / React for modern frontend applications in the nx monorepo
• Enterprise security architecture & access control
• Integration of JWT tokens with Auth0, OAuth, OIDC, IP guards, BOLA protection, and secret vaults
• Authorization concepts with RBAC, ABAC, and native Postgres Row-Level Security (RLS)
• Built internal microfrontends with Retool for fast prototyping and operational business processes

Technologies: ABAC, AWS CDK, AWS CloudWatch, AWS ECS, AWS EKS, AWS Fargate, AWS RDS, AWS S3, Algolia, Auth0, DataDog, Docker, GitHub Actions, Grafana, GraphQL, GraphQL Mesh, Hasura, JWT, Jaeger, Java, JavaScript, Jest, Kotlin, Kubernetes, Monorepo, Next.js, OIDC, Playwright, Postgres, Postgres RLS, Prometheus, RBAC, Redis, Retool, Serverless, Stripe, Terraform, TypeScript, Vitest

• Developed business strategy, positioning, and market approach for a new B2B and B2C trading company.
• Designed and implemented the corporate website and online shop end to end, and coordinated suppliers and digital sales capabilities.

• Leading enterprise BI transformation across Power BI & Microsoft Fabric, delivering scalable data models, automated reporting, and high-performance analytics solutions for commercial and operational leadership.
• Building and optimizing Power BI Dataflows, Fabric Lakehouse datasets, semantic models, and automated reporting pipelines to improve data scalability, governance, and reporting performance.
• Driving dashboard modernization and KPI governance by translating complex business requirements into executive-level insights, interactive visualizations, and decision-ready analytics.
• Designing end-to-end Microsoft Fabric architectures integrating data ingestion, transformation, virtualization, and enterprise reporting across cross-functional business domains with SAP BW to Qlik to Power BI migration.
• Delivering AI-enabled reporting capabilities, threshold-based alerting, and automation frameworks within the Power BI ecosystem to accelerate business decision-making.
• Partnering with commercial leadership, analytics teams, and IT stakeholders to standardize KPIs, optimize BI strategy, and deliver scalable, business-critical reporting solutions.
• Recognized for combining strong stakeholder leadership, technical architecture expertise, and business-driven analytics to deliver impactful enterprise BI transformation initiatives.

• Modernization of a large-scale Java enterprise application*

The project is modernizing a complex enterprise application that has grown over many years. The existing Spring-based legacy system runs on Java 8, OSGi, and Eclipse RCP and is being gradually migrated to a modern, maintainable architecture with Java 25 and Quarkus.

Marcus works on analysis, architecture, refactoring, and implementation. One focus is on untangling historically grown structures and dependencies and on building a clean, sustainable Java and Quarkus technology stack.

Tools & technologies: Java 8, Java 25, Quarkus, Hibernate ORM with Panache, EclipseLink, OSGi, Eclipse RCP, Maven, JUnit, Mockito, REST, JSON, Git, Eclipse IDE, IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate, Jira, Confluence

• Development of safety-related embedded software for a mobile machine on a Hydac TTC 2390 controller.
• Implementation in C with consideration of SIL 3 / ASIL D and MISRA-C:2025.
• Implementation of communication via CAN, CANopen, and J1939.

Standards, guidelines and norms: ISO 26262, IEC 61508, MISRA-C:2025

Technologies: C99, Hydac TTC 2390, Infineon TriCore Aurix TC397, Hightec C/C++ Compiler, PC-lint Plus, CAN, CANopen, J1939, MISRA-C:2025

AI Agent SaaS

Founded and built an AI agent SaaS for automated customer support and lead qualification, including implementation with pilot customers.

• Service → product transformation: productization from the agency into an independent AI agent SaaS. The starting point was a specific customer problem; the product was developed together with the customer.
• Developed and launched AI agents for website inbound, lead qualification, and customer service, reaching €8K MRR.
• Structured and led a remote team across engineering, LLM ops, and customer enablement.
• Case PTC Auto (e-commerce on Shopify): connected an AI support agent to the store, automated product data & support workflows, reducing workload by ~10–15 hours per week per support employee.
• Set up GDPR-compliant data processing for the AI agents: data processing agreements, deletion policies, and customer data storage locations.
• Assessed agents against the EU AI Act (risk class, transparency requirements) and built them accordingly.
• Addressed customers’ compliance and security requirements (questionnaires, evidence, contracts) to make sales possible in the first place.
• Built technical safeguards into the product to prevent agent misbehavior: hallucinations, escalation to humans, and logging.

• Building a data integration platform for high, medium, and low voltage assets for contextual analysis of time series with master data from the SCADA control system (IEC 60870 104), INIS, and SAP.
• Responsibility for the architecture and implementation of the solution, as well as sparring partner for the Product Owner.
• Use of Kotlin, Spring Boot, Maven, TimescaleDB, PostgreSQL, liquibase, Elements IoT, Docker, Kubernetes, Grafana, Python, jupyter, and various API gateways.

• Ride-sharing and bus platform, live and fully functional. Backend with Spring Boot 4.1 on Java 21, PostgreSQL with Flyway, and Testcontainers integration tests. Hosted in my own AWS account (ECS Fargate, ALB, ECR, IAM Least-Privilege) with CI/CD via GitHub Actions and OIDC federation without static credentials. Development fully AI-supported with Claude Code, including custom skills and project-specific memory. Spring Boot · Java 21 · PostgreSQL · Flyway · Docker · AWS ECS/ALB/ECR · CI/CD · GitHub Actions · Claude Code

• Development and optimization of the RTL+ frontend application for SmartTV and set-top box platforms with React and Next.js.
• Key role in the technical coordination of developers within the team and in coordinating implementation.
• Central interface to adjacent teams to simplify development processes and improve cross-team alignment.
• Improved frontend performance, stability, and rendering behavior on low-powered devices in a restricted runtime environment.
• Implemented a frontend testing strategy with Jest, React Testing Library, and Playwright.
• Implemented accessibility improvements according to WCAG 2.2 and WAI-ARIA.
• Integrated Didomi Consent Management as a contribution to increasing ad monetization on streaming platforms.
• Used AI-supported engineering workflows with Cursor for structured implementation, refactoring, and faster problem solving.

Technologies used: React, Next.js, TypeScript, JavaScript, GraphQL, Apollo Gateway, Zustand, Tailwind CSS, Styled Components, React Testing Library, Playwright, Jest, HTML5, CSS3, AWS Lambda, EC2, CloudFront, S3, GitLab CI/CD, NX, Cursor

• Used OpenCode and AI-assisted software engineering to design, implement, refactor, test, and document an end-to-end RAW/SDTM/ADaM pipeline in R for Dr. Falk Pharma (07/2026), including metadata-driven transformations, automated validation rules and QC, traceability, and reproducible clinical outputs.

Independent, part-time open-source engineering focused on build-time tooling for Next.js, React, MDX, and JavaScript/TypeScript compiler pipelines.

• Built next-slug-splitter to optimize content-driven Next.js applications. It analyzes MDX content at build time, resolves component usage, and generates route-specific handlers so pages avoid sharing the full catch-all component bundle.

• Created supporting plugins and utilities for scoped MDX transformations, nested component dependency resolution, compile-time refinement, safe ESTree evaluation, and object-graph diffing.

• Own architecture, API design, implementation, automated testing, npm publishing, documentation, demos, and performance benchmarking.

Building blocks:

• remark-scoped-mdx: Context-aware AST transformations with nested scope isolation, typed component registries, and prop inference.

• recma-component-resolver: Dependency-graph analysis and selective component forwarding across nested MDX includes.

• recma-static-refiner: Build-time prop extraction, schema validation, derivation, and pruning.

• estree-util-to-static-value and object-graph-delta: Safe static evaluation and deterministic, cycle-safe structural diffing.

Tech Stack:

• Frameworks: TypeScript · Next.js · React · MDX

• Compiler tooling: Unified · Remark · Recma · MDAST · ESTree · ts-morph · esbuild

• Competencies: Static analysis · AST traversal and transformation · dependency graphs · code generation · schema validation · route and bundle splitting

• Tooling: Vitest · tsup · npm · performance benchmarking

• Designing the audit logging framework
• Implementing APIs for developers to integrate in their codebase
• Implementing ingestion pipeline, database query layer and UI for browsing the audit events
• Improving stability and reliability of the backend system