Technical Director
in minutes from over 15,000 CVs with the power of AIDirect complex software architecture, oversee engineering teams, and implement robust infrastructure. FRATCH matches you with vetted, available Technical Directors who align with your tech stack and industry requirements.
Meet FRATCH Technical Director
Niko Schmuck
Last position:
Developing Architect, Technical Lead "gridlytics" at HH Energienetze
- 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.
Nuran Dolunay
Last position:
Council Member & Consultant at Gerson Lehrman Group (GLG)
- Providing expert insights and strategic advice to clients across various industries, including manufacturing, supply chain management, logistics optimization, and SAP implementations.
- Conducting market analysis and benchmarking for industry leaders.
- Engaging with executives and stakeholders on logistics and operational challenges and informing critical business decisions.
- Leverage over 20 years of industry experience to deliver actionable recommendations, contributing to the client’s operational excellence and growth.
Klaus Zwingel
Last position:
Head of HR, Machinery and Plant Engineering at Interim Management (freelance)
- Acting as a professional sparring partner for management and leaders on HR topics
- Advising employees on HR matters
- Maintaining department capability during transition
- Analyzing weaknesses in the performance appraisal process
- Integrating the SAP appraisal tool
- Negotiating and organizing short-time work
- Analyzing and consolidating employment contracts
- Preparing references and recruiting
- Advising on organizational development
Bobster Falvey
Last position:
Bid Manager at Confidential
- Bid Manager for 33kV/ (HV) DNO RFP.
- Connecting critical sites like data centres to the grid, BESS, LNG, & renewables.
Udo Bocken
Last position:
Interim Head of Technical Purchasing at Riha WeserGold Getränke GmbH & Co. KG
- Leading technical purchasing with 4 employees
- Tendering, negotiating, and closing the gas supply for 2025 / 2026 and 2027
- Electricity purchasing for 2024 and 2025
- Feasibility analysis of a photovoltaic system for the sites Rinteln, Dodow, and Waibstadt, including tendering and negotiating possible partners
- Purchasing fossil fuels: diesel, gas, and electricity as well as CO2 certificates
- Purchasing industrial gases including CO2
- New setup in the area of cleaning and disinfecting agents for 3 plant sites and optimizing the stock handling of these hazardous substances
- Profitability calculation for the gas turbine (steam and electricity)
- Fleet concept: conventional drive vs. e-mobility
- Purchasing 29 new tractor units
- Two major maintenance projects: renewal of the outer shell of a high-bay warehouse as well as renewal of warehouse and high-bay warehouse logistics hardware and software
- Negotiating framework, maintenance, and consignment stock contracts including Capex and MRO with the four main machine suppliers
- Supporting performance issues during the commissioning of a new machine
- Negotiating and closing the contract for the conversion of three machines for the site in Spain
- Savings in the seven-figure range
- Return on Interim Manager (RoIM): factor 4.7
Daniel Petyus
Last position:
Enterprise Architect at SiriusXM
- Reduced annual AWS spend by 30% (~$400k) through DynamoDB rightsizing, ECS workload restructuring and Savings Plan adoption.
- Designed Scala 3 pipelines on AWS Kinesis, Lambda and DynamoDB processing 200k messages/second using cats-effect and fs2; ingested into Databricks for analytics and experimentation.
- Migrated legacy Java 17 Spring Boot services to a functional stack with zero downtime.
- Led a 4-person DevOps squad implementing automated disaster-recovery drills for DynamoDB and Aurora.
Benjamin Rähmer
Last position:
Technical Director at maincubes Holding & Service GmbH
- Development and implementation of technical guidelines for electrical and mechanical systems
- Development of the electrical safety organisation as responsible electrician (gVEFK)
- Implementation and oversight of DCIM and related technical software solutions
- Design of technical solutions for lifecycle infrastructure and customer projects
Thomas Übermeier
Last position:
Head of Engineering - Midnight at IOG / Midnight
IOG (IOHK), is one of the world's pre-eminent blockchain infrastructure research and engineering companies.
- Converted a lingering R&D project into a cohesive, production-ready testnet; built and scaled the 35-member engineering team (Core, QA, SRE) to achieve this goal.
- Defined strategic direction and aligned technology development with business objectives as a key member of the leadership.
- Optimized software development processes and implemented agile methodologies, enhancing operational efficiency and code security.
- Delivered projects in a fast-paced startup environment through effective project management and resource allocation.
Hemangi Tawade
Last position:
Founder & Principal Advisor
- Diagnose genuine AI-readiness in procurement environments before technology investment is committed
- Identify where data quality gaps, process immaturity, and governance failures will cause AI initiatives to stall
- Guide leadership teams through the strategic, organisational, and technical decisions that determine whether AI deployments succeed or fail
- Conduct the PAF-I Diagnostic (Procurement AI-Fitness Index), a structured assessment across procurement data, process maturity, technology landscape, governance, and organisational capability
- Produce a scored AI-readiness profile with a prioritised action roadmap for leadership
- Deliver engagement models including clarity work packages, alignment work packages, momentum work packages, transformation advisory, and executive workshops
Darko Zivkovic
Last position:
Technical Lead at Sipod
- Designed and led the architectural modernization of a mission-critical enterprise application suite, migrating 1M+ lines of legacy code into a modular, service-oriented JavaScript and Node.js architecture with clean API and UI boundaries.
- Built high-throughput Node.js and TypeScript API middleware handling async data synchronization between web clients and cloud-hosted SQL repositories, applying REST design principles and efficient JSON payload serialization.
- Developed an async data processing engine using Node.js worker threads, queues, and non-blocking I/O, achieving consistent low-latency performance under heavy load.
- Architected enterprise web management portals in React and Next.js with Node.js service APIs, TypeORM persistence logic, multi-tenant data access patterns, and automated report generation.
- Designed AI-assisted development workflows using Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, RAG, MCP server patterns, Agent Skills, and structured prompts to generate tests, refactor code, and validate charting logic.
- Reduced SQL Server data retrieval times by 55% through advanced indexing strategies, query refactoring, and schema redesign targeting large-scale analytical workloads consumed by Node.js APIs.
- Led a 5-developer team, enforcing code quality standards, Jest testing protocols, AI verification, evaluation, output confirmation, and consistent API design across backend services and React application layers.
Michael Seliger
Last position:
Technical Lead, Development and Requirements Gathering at Decoupled frontend for a website in the pharmacy sector
- Ongoing support and further development.
Shiqing Fan
Last position:
Technical Director at EmotionPool GmbH
- Spearheaded the EU market entry strategy for L3/L4 autonomous logistics vehicles, driving the technological localization and deployment of the parent company’s smart robotics portfolio.
- Orchestrated technical alignment between top-tier autonomous driving suppliers across China and Europe, translating complex client requirements into precise engineering specifications compliant with EU standards.
- Cultivated strategic joint R&D initiatives with leading European universities, research institutes, and enterprises, accelerating the transition of cutting-edge robotic concepts into commercial products.
- Directed the end-to-end architecture of intelligent warehousing solutions, guiding cross-functional teams in optimizing hardware integration for autonomous vehicles & robots, and overall system performance.
- Led the R&D of high-fidelity simulation and AI algorithms using NVIDIA Isaac Sim & Lab, establishing robust "Sim-to-Real" pipelines to train and validate dynamic path planning optimization, intelligent obstacle avoidance, and complex navigation stacks prior to physical deployment.
- Maintained hands-on oversight of the core system architecture, focusing on bottom-level performance tuning, AI model inference acceleration with TensorRT/ONNX Runtime, and sensor integration.
Patrik Garten
Last position:
Technical Lead Conversational AI at CANCOM
- Technical lead of a team developing agentic chatbot solutions (React, TypeScript, Python, FastAPI)
- Architecture design for multi-LLM dialog systems - focus on maintainability, UX, and autonomous execution
- Stakeholder alignment, CI/CD processes, and AI integration at enterprise level
Gabriele Caracausi
Last position:
Startup Mentor and Technical Advisor (Volunteer) at Faros Accelerator
- Mentoring startups about technology trends and solutions, business models, market and competition research.
Andreas Dietrich
Last position:
Interim Chief Technology & Product Officer at Babbel GmbH
- Restructuring for product-led growth in the field of digital user-centric tech product development language learning experiences
- Scaling empowered tech product teams
- Anti-fragile software engineering
Discover over 15,000 top freelancers
Technical Director statistics
Aggregated from the professional profiles of matched freelancers.
Experience
20 years
Position duration
3.2 years
Positions per freelancer
11
Top business areas
Product Development, Information Technology, Project Management
Top industries
Information Technology, Professional Services, Manufacturing
Certification focus areas
Information Technology, Project Management, Quality Assurance
Bachelor's degree or higher
92%
Master's degree or higher
53%
Doctorate
12%
Certifications per freelancer
2
Most common languages
English, German, French
Speak two or more languages
96%
Based on our profile pool as of 21 Aug 2026.
Daily rate distribution
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.
Average rates for Technical Director
Rates are based on recent contracts and do not include FRATCH margin.
The average daily rate is the mean of all daily rates from recent contracts of comparable freelancers on our platform.
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.
Calculated based on our freelancers’ daily rates as of 21 Aug 2026. Actual rates may vary depending on seniority level, experience, skill specialization, project complexity, and engagement length.
About the role
Strategic Engineering Leadership
A freelance Technical Director bridges the gap between high-level business strategy and hands-on software engineering. They oversee complex system architectures, define the technical roadmap, and establish software engineering standards across development teams. Whether guiding a legacy software modernization project or establishing a modern cloud infrastructure, these veteran leaders ensure that technology systems scale reliably alongside business growth.
Key Deliverables and Responsibilities
- Designing scalable, secure, and highly resilient software architectures.
- Evaluating and selecting technology stacks, development tools, and third-party services.
- Mentoring engineering leads and aligning cross-functional development squads.
- Introducing robust DevOps practices, automated CI/CD pipelines, and testing frameworks.
- Analyzing technical debt and conducting comprehensive system security audits.
- Defining disaster recovery strategies and data compliance protocols.
Technical Expertise and Domains
Modern technology leaders bring deep expertise in cloud ecosystems like AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform. They are well-versed in microservices architectures, containerization with Docker and Kubernetes, database optimization, and secure API design. Beyond programming languages, they master software delivery methodologies, Agile frameworks, and system integration patterns to ensure smooth deployment cycles and high platform availability.
When to Onboard a Freelance Director
Companies hire external technical leaders during pivotal organizational transitions. Typical scenarios include scaling up engineering teams rapidly, auditing legacy codebases, or leading a major migration to modern cloud environments. An interim leader provides objective guidance without the onboarding delay of a permanent C-level executive. They quickly diagnose delivery bottlenecks, streamline development workflows, and set up the internal engineering team for sustained success.
Frequently asked questions
What clients ask us most about Technical Director — answered in short.
A freelance Technical Director provides strategic and technical leadership to engineering teams. They design system architecture, choose technology stacks, and streamline development processes to align with business objectives.
While a freelance CTO focuses on long-term business strategy and external technology relations, a Technical Director is more hands-on with execution, system design, and the daily productivity of the engineering department.
Hiring an interim technical leader is ideal for short-term projects, sudden leadership departures, or major architectural migrations. This allows your organization to access executive-level expertise instantly without long recruitment cycles.
Yes, a freelance engineering director can operate entirely in a remote capacity. They leverage modern collaboration tools, digital whiteboards, and structured communication channels to lead distributed teams effectively from anywhere.
A qualified technical director must possess strong architectural skills, deep knowledge of cloud platforms, and expertise in scalable system design. They should also understand DevOps practices, modern database structures, and software security standards.
You can evaluate a freelance technology leader by reviewing their portfolio of shipped software products, their experience with complex system migrations, and their ability to explain complex technical issues to non-technical stakeholders.
Companies in fast-growing sectors like software-as-a-service, e-commerce, fintech, and digital health benefit greatly from a freelance Technical Director. Any industry facing digital transformation or rapid scale requires this level of technical oversight.
An experienced interim manager integrates by conducting quick initial audits, hosting structured alignment sessions, and establishing clear lines of communication. They focus on empowering existing team members rather than disrupting current productive workflows.
The average hourly rate for Technical Director is 111 €, which corresponds to a daily rate of about 889 € based on an 8-hour working day.
Of the freelancers working as Technical Director, 92% hold at least a Bachelor's degree, 53% hold at least a Master's degree, and 12% hold a doctorate.
On average, freelancers working as Technical Director have 20 years of professional experience, with a single engagement typically lasting around 3.2 years.
The most common languages among freelancers working as Technical Director are English (98%), German (74%), and French (24%).
The most common industries among freelancers working as Technical Director are Information Technology (78%), Professional Services (44%), and Manufacturing (43%).
The most common business areas among freelancers working as Technical Director are Product Development (87%), Information Technology (86%), and Project Management (74%).
FRATCH Technical Director main locations
Our freelancers and interim experts are at home across the DACH region — available on-site in the major business hubs or fully remote. Choose a location to discover matched specialists, local market insights and up-to-date availability.
Request a free demo
Get in touch with the FRATCH team and we will get back to you within 4 hours.
Would you rather directly get in touch?
We always have the time for a call or email!
Philipp Thomaschewski
FRATCH CEO
