Fleet Management Experts in Germany

• 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

• Interim leadership responsibility for realigning the entire leadership organization – away from classic target setting and solution specification toward a teal-oriented organization with clear responsibility for each individual employee.
• Stabilization of production processes and reduction of the backlog in all customer projects.
• Building up the necessary material inventory (agreed with end customers by contract) – eliminated backlogs and special runs, achieved 2 weeks of material inventory.
• From the start of the assignment, also took over overall technical responsibility for Research & Development (R&D).
• In addition to the CSO/COO role, took over responsibility for controlling and finance in the last 9 months.

Responsibilities:

• Commercial assistance to management
• Project coordination
• Interface management
• Accounting and preparatory bookkeeping
• Quotation management

Interfaces with:

• Management
• Sales team
• Tax consultancy

Project language: German

traigo is VTG's digital rail logistics and fleet management platform. It processes large volumes of telemetry, mileage, geofence, sensor and wagon-movement events in near real time and provides operational services for rail logistics customers across Europe.

As part of Team Customer Selfcare, I worked on the design, implementation, optimisation and operation of large-scale backend services and event-driven processing pipelines — covering both feature development and operational ownership of business-critical production systems. I also regularly acted as first responder for production incidents, data inconsistencies and performance investigations across multiple distributed services.

• Design and implementation of event-driven backend services.
• Migration and replacement of legacy processing pipelines.
• Development of replay / rebuild mechanisms for large event datasets.
• High-throughput asynchronous event processing on SNS / SQS.
• Database and query optimisation for PostgreSQL and DynamoDB.
• Design of scalable read / write models and aggregation pipelines.
• Production troubleshooting and operational support.
• Performance tuning and infrastructure scaling.
• Design and stabilisation of integration and system tests.
• Technical concepts, architecture documentation, and cross-team collaboration.
• Support the further development of existing GitLab CI/CD pipelines

Geofence & Wagon Stay Processing

• Algorithm to detect vehicles within geofences (entry, exit, dwell time).
• Event sourcing with guaranteed chronological order within the affected time window.
• Refactored geofence event and wagon-stay processing logic for performance.
• Resolved race conditions and event-ordering problems in distributed services; server-side filtering, aggregation and optimised query pipelines.
• Repair and replay tooling for corrupted or inconsistent movement data.

Fleet Metadata & Mileage

• Modernised the service; migrated storage from DynamoDB to PostgreSQL to improve traceability and accelerate new features.
• Scalable mileage aggregation and replay mechanisms.
• Read / write models and optimised queries for high-volume mileage calculations.

Sensor & Telematics Integration

• Integrated telemetry and sensor processing pipelines.
• Snapshot and state-calculation logic for sensor systems.
• APIs and persistence models for wagon sensor data; data-quality improvements.
• Further development of a service using gRPC for intra-service communication.

Movement Segment Processing & Routing

• Migrated services to new movement-segment event streams.
• Built replay and rebuild tooling for segment correction.
• Optimised throughput and reliability for high-volume event processing.

Condition Monitoring & Wagon Analytics

• APIs and backend services for wagon condition monitoring.
• Brake-wear prediction processing and wagon analytics functionality.
• PostgreSQL views and optimised query models for operational dashboards.

Operational Reliability - First Responder

• Investigated production incidents and distributed-system failures; DLQ analysis, replay and operational recovery.
• Tuned database performance and AWS infrastructure under production load.
• Improved observability, monitoring and operational tooling.
• Supported rollout strategies, monitoring and post-deployment stabilisation.

AI • Enterprise SaaS • Product Strategy • Product Discovery

Led product design for enterprise SaaS, AI-powered and customer-facing products.

• Defined product strategy from discovery to delivery
• Designed complex workflows, design systems and scalable UX
• Led UX research, product discovery and stakeholder workshops

• Available for short-term assignments in the areas of assistance and purchasing
• Focus on executive support, project assistance, and operational relief
• Quick familiarization with new company structures

Development of AI-based and classical models for analyzing medical and patient data, including medication analyses, diagnosis analyses, forecasts, procedure analyses, dosage analyses, comorbidity analyses, prescription analyses, patient potential analyses, and referral profile analyses. Analyses in the area of Real World Evidence.

• Gathering customer requirements
• Planning the subproject
• Designing and defining KPIs
• Designing and developing models and visualizations of the results using customer dashboards
• Developing and implementing DWH adjustments
• Deriving recommendations for action

Methods, technologies: Simulation, Artificial Intelligence, Python, R, SQL, Microsoft Power BI, Amazon Web Services, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, Databricks, Multivariate Statistics

• Support of HR processes throughout the entire employee lifecycle - from onboarding and transfers to salary changes and offboarding
• Preparation of employment contracts and references and maintenance in SAP SuccessFactors
• Management of personnel files, archiving of documents, and monitoring of deadlines for follow-up processes
• Handling inactive employment relationships
• Processing compensation-related changes - e.g. recurring payments, deductions, one-time payments, and reimbursements
• Handling work and commuting accidents and reporting them to the employers' liability insurance association
• Responding to employee questions about statutory and internal benefits such as parental leave, educational leave, or company car policies
• HR correspondence via email, mail, phone, and the HR ticketing system
• Close cooperation with HR Business Partners, Payroll, Finance, fleet management, and other internal interfaces
• Support of HR initiatives within the scope of M&A and Human Capital Management
• Ensuring compliance with legal and internal company requirements
• Creating reports and ensuring a reliable data basis

• Collection of user stories across the whole platform, leading the redesign process.
• Dashboard redesign based on user research.
• Establishing a workflow for kickoff sessions as well as planning the way of working & collaboration across several teams and disciplines.

• Social-pedagogical family support (SPFH)
• Intensive care and support for families
• Counseling for children, young people, and parents
• Intensive support for social integration

• Regulated environment within a German banking group (approx. 8,500 employees, hybrid cloud strategy).

• Responsible for operating, provisioning, and continuously securing business-critical platforms – including a GenAI chat application, a big data/AI platform, and data science workspaces based on Azure Virtual Desktops and VMs. Ownership of Azure DevOps projects for ShaiHulud and React2Shell, as well as BSI alerts – Security Operations improvements across the SDLC.

• Deployment responsibility for the GenAI chat application, big data/AI platform (BDAI), and data science workspaces (AVD/VM-based) in the respective landing zones.

• Deployment & release management: end-to-end responsibility for deploying portal and service applications across multiple Azure landing zones, including technical approvals, compliance with development team deployment guidelines, and ensuring ITIL-based change and release processes via ServiceNow.

• Azure landing zones & network architecture: design, provisioning, and operation of Azure landing zones for 3-tier web applications with enhanced network segmentation, VNet peering, hub-and-spoke architectures, private endpoints, and firewall integration across separate subscriptions and tenants.

• Azure DevOps governance & operations: ownership of the Azure DevOps organization, including projects, repositories, and CI/CD pipelines; implementation of governance requirements such as branch policies, approval gates, permission models, and audit-ready operating structures.

• Infrastructure as Code (Terraform): design, implementation, and operation of a modular Terraform architecture for standardized cloud infrastructure deployment, including state management, provider versioning, reusability, and policy-as-code approaches.

• CI/CD pipeline engineering: design, operation, and optimization of complex YAML-based CI/CD pipelines with multi-stage deployments, template standardization, self-hosted agents, integrated secret management, and automated quality and security checks.

• Git migration & platform consolidation: planning and execution of repository and pipeline migration from Azure DevOps to GitLab CI/CD, including automated scripts, full Git history transfer, pipeline porting, and platform consolidation.

• Container & platform operations (AKS): operation and security assessment of containerized workloads on Azure Kubernetes Service, centralization of on-premises container registries for ACR.

• OpenShift (OCP) security reviews: security assessment of code baselines, build pipelines, and deployment processes for on-premises OpenShift clusters with critical applications, and derivation of specific hardening recommendations.

• Shift-left security & DevSecOps transformation: introduction of a company-wide shift-left approach for early security integration in development and deployment processes, enabling developers to perform self-led security checks and sustainably reduce vulnerabilities before production (IDE integrations, pre-commit hooks, local scanners).

• Software supply chain security: analysis and mitigation of supply chain risks in NPM- and Yarn-based applications through dependency audits, CI/CD pipeline hardening, token rotation, and restriction of risky build and lifecycle mechanisms.

• Frontend & framework security (React / Next.js): security assessment and coordination of critical vulnerability remediation across platform applications and web frameworks, including coordination and complementary technical mitigations with all teams following BSI alerts.

• Software composition analysis (SCA): introduction and operation of automated vulnerability scans for container images, pipelines/artifacts, and third-party dependencies, including SBOM exports within CI/CD pipelines.

• SAST/DAST integration: design and piloting of static and dynamic application security tests in close collaboration with security architecture and development teams, for continuous improvement of code and runtime security, and establishing operational acceptance tests.

• Artifact & registry consolidation: analysis and consolidation of all package and container repositories for service applications and AKS workloads, aiming for a centralized, secured registry strategy with centralized vulnerability scanning and governance.

• Dependency-Track & SBOM strategy: advising the compliance board on introducing a central SBOM and vulnerability management platform to increase enterprise-wide dependency transparency and accelerate CVE response capability.

• CI/CD pipeline hardening: security analysis and cleanup of the existing pipeline landscape by removing unused pipelines, improving secrets hygiene, implementing least-privilege principles, and isolating build agent environments.

• Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF) optimization: analysis and tuning of existing Azure WAF rules (OWASP Top 10 Core Rule Set, DSR/SDC, custom rules) to defend against known vulnerabilities and exploit patterns, including reducing false positives and improving threat detection.

• Documentation & stakeholder communication: creating and maintaining technical documentation, runbooks, and architecture overviews in Jira and Confluence, as well as active knowledge transfer between operations, development, security, and compliance stakeholders.

• data integration for SAP marketing applications Emarsys and SMC
• processing data from SAP applications for email delivery
• event-driven architecture with around 50 microservices for processing several million messages per day during high season
• development of a marketing campaign management tool (frontend Angular, backend C# ASP Web API)
• support for the Product Owner in communication with stakeholders and creation of epics, stories, and tasks

• Led 34 specialists in application management and software engineering
• Developed and ran fleet management for 45,000 vehicles for the German Armed Forces using SAP R/3 and SAP S/4 Hana modules
• Provided and enhanced software for rental and leasing business as well as mapping all company processes of BwFPS, including mobile apps
• Supported the electrification of the Bundeswehr vehicle fleet
• Developed and operated cloud-based custom solutions
• Responsible for the security architecture of the entire IT landscape, following the IT security requirements of the Bundeswehr, BSI IT-Grundschutz, and critical infrastructures
• Secured terrestrial communication networks, mobile networks, IT middleware, and applications against cyberattacks
• Migrated the fleet management system to SAP S/4 Hana, achieving efficiency gains
• Developed a complexity index for the IT landscape and reduced it through retirement, modernization, and interface removal
• Used AI models to support procurement processes, knowledge management, and process simplification

• assumed commercial management for three companies at the site

• monthly reporting to the US parent company (US GAAP)

• timely submission of all filings (VAT returns, statistics)

• weekly forecasting and production progress

• preparation of the 2024 and 2025 annual financial statements (HGB + IFRS)

• completion of the 2024 financial statements with tax returns (PwC)

• completion of the 2027 budget planning

• project controlling

• point of contact for tax advisors and auditors

• further development of processes and tools

• timely submission of various reports in a complex group structure

• resolution of tax issues

• stabilization of administrative processes

• re-motivation of employees despite short-time work