PostgreSQL Experts in Hamburg

• Assumed responsibility for backend architecture and technical strategy, planning and leading the platform's evolution in close collaboration with the CTO
• Simultaneously drove the development of new features for the housing and tenant management platform, balancing high-level architectural design with hands-on implementation
• Utilized AI-assisted workflows (with tools such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) and worked on AI-based features (with tools such as N8N, Mastra, ElevenLabs)

Technologies: Node.js, TypeScript, React.js, Next.js, PostgreSQL, Google Cloud, Docker, Kubernetes

Full overall responsibility: product, technology, compliance and go-to-market

• Delivered an enterprise MVP in 54 days, exceeding scope and schedule.
• Won a 250k € ARR anchor customer and built a sustainable enterprise sales pipeline in the first quarter.
• Paid PoCs with Zalando (35k €) and tesa (26k €), validating product-market fit with Tier-1 enterprise customers.
• Initiated ISO-27001 and TISAX certification processes. Left when the venture entered its next organizational phase.

Co-founded a software agency building custom web and cross-platform products. I owned the technical decisions across the whole portfolio and led 12 people, while carrying delivery planning, process and client relationships for 11 clients across 3 industries.

• Technical leadership: owned the technical decisions for the codebase across every project — stack, architecture, code conventions and the tooling the team worked with — and led the developers on how work got built through code reviews, pair programming and mentoring across a team ranging from junior to senior, keeping the codebase coherent as the portfolio and the team grew

• Delivery planning against the financial plan: built the company's financial plan and derived from it the billable hours each developer had to reach per month and the hours each project could absorb to stay within budget; planned capacity and scope against those figures and negotiated budgets and delivery dates directly with clients

• Client ownership: technical contact across the portfolio — requirements gathering and prioritisation, scoping and estimates, timeline communication, budget negotiation, and consistent transparency throughout delivery

• Team and people: owned the hiring and interview process end to end and took responsibility for offboarding where it was needed; designed an onboarding that got new developers productive within 1–2 days; cleared blockers daily and kept a close eye on where effort was creating value and where it was not

• Process ownership: consolidated a micro-service landscape spread over 15+ repositories into a single monorepo, cutting backend development time by ~40% and simplifying releases for 6 engineers; set up deployment pipelines with GitHub Actions and GitLab CI; ran retrospectives and turned the feedback into concrete changes; introduced AI agents into day-to-day development

• Delivered short-staffed: when the team shrank from 8 developers to 2, restructured scope, introduced AI-assisted development to hold the schedule and took on Go backend work alongside my own frontend scope

• Architecture and code: defined the architecture for every project in the portfolio — the structure the rest of the team built within — and wrote roughly 90% of the frontend code myself, from SSR applications with Next.js and Remix to cross-platform apps with Capacitor

• From zero to production: took a practice management platform — administration, inventory, integrated online shop, chat messenger — from an empty repository to production. Live in 7 markets with at least 7 more coming up, serving tens of thousands of users

• Delivery under pressure: built and shipped a replacement online shop for a Fortune 250 client in 4 days, restoring order intake while their global shops had been offline for several weeks

• Design system: built a cross-project design system used across 7 products, so new projects and features started from a shared, consistent base

• Cross-platform and real-time: built iOS and Android apps with Capacitor for a client live event with 1,000+ participants — web sockets and push notifications for real-time content, Stripe payments supporting PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay and cards

Key technologies: React, TypeScript, Next.js, Remix, GraphQL, ConnectRPC, Redux, Zustand, Go, Node.js, Turborepo, Nx, Capacitor, Ionic, WebSockets, Stripe, PostgreSQL, Playwright, Cypress, Vitest, Storybook, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot

• Onboarded and conducted comprehensive documentation and system analysis to assess the existing data infrastructure, facilitating rapid integration and collaboration across functional data teams (modelling, processing, reporting).
• Collaboratively defined the architecture and project structure for a central data pipeline repository, including hierarchical standards, knowledge management strategies, and role-specific responsibilities, enhancing maintainability and onboarding speed.
• Evaluated and validated open-source data routing tools (Airbyte, Apache NiFi, Dragster) for ingest and sync requirements in retail analytics, including local benchmarking and error-state testing.
• Led the design and deployment of Airbyte in Kubernetes, creating customized Helm charts, securing secrets handling, and configuring Ingress with TLS and internal DNS routing, ensuring full API and UI accessibility.
• Troubleshot and resolved Ingress controller issues, iterating through multiple stages of debugging and testing, and documented setup and replication steps for scalable reuse.
• Mapped data models to ARTS standard, supporting schema alignment for ERP and reporting use cases, and coordinated review loops to align future data processing logic.
• Drafted strategic 1-pagers comparing MinIO, Pub/Sub, and routing architectures, providing technical guidance for architectural decisions and investment planning.
• Enabled secure access and authentication mechanisms, including initial evaluation for SAML integration, cluster-level configuration reviews, and service annotation improvements.

• Lead architect for an enterprise loan digitisation programme, coordinating 12 engineers across five workstreams and serving as final technical authority on system design.
• Cut critical application response times by 68% (display 17.3s → 5.6s; modification 11.8s → 5.0s) through targeted caching, OData query optimisation and lazy-loading refactoring; further optimisation in progress.
• Own production error triage, prioritisation and resolution across a multi-application portfolio supporting live lending operations.
• Design and implement SAP Fiori applications on SAP UI5, TypeScript and RAP, owning delivery from architecture and code through rollout and production support.
• Established C4 architecture documentation and decision records for the full programme, enabling faster onboarding and consistent cross-workstream design governance.
• Co-managed S/4HANA release cycle alongside primary responsibilities, coordinating directly with SAP support to resolve critical system issues across the portfolio.

Technologies: n8n, Notion, OpenAI API, Claude, MS AI Foundry, MS CoPilot Studio, MS CoPilot, LLM, Node.js, Vercel, LangGraph, PostgreSQL, pgEdge, pgvector, Docker, LangChain, Ollama, Open WebUI

• Continuous evaluation and prioritization of internal automation needs
• ~20 AI agents in active use: research, content pipelines, document processing
• 5 n8n workflows for automated data and process control
• Architecture built on the same principles as in customer projects: state management, event-driven orchestration, API integration
• Ongoing operation and further development

• work in the Developer-Experience team to improve developer experience and tooling for all teams of the RTL+ streaming platform
• development of reusable GitLab CI/CD components to standardize processes and automatically enforce code quality and security gates
• infrastructure automation with Pulumi
• operation and monitoring of GitLab Runners in AWS with Kubernetes
• integration and automation of Renovate in GitLab pipelines for continuous dependency updates
• extension of Backstage as the central developer platform to optimize internal workflows and self-service capabilities
• development of various tools and automations in TypeScript, Go, and Python

• Implementing cross-industry applications with LLMs
• Developing cloud infrastructure for clients
• Implemented end-to-end data pipeline to deploy models in real time
• Managed overall IT system administration and desktop support

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.

Strategic technology leadership and architecture consulting.

• Fractional CTO & interim management for startups, scale-ups, and enterprises – technical strategy, team building, architecture oversight, and delivery.
• Architecture consulting on cloud-native, distributed, and event-driven systems: reviews, design partnerships, and ongoing advisory.
• Event-driven architecture training – a hands-on 2-day course for engineering teams
• Conference speaker on distributed systems

Project:

• Migration of existing VB6 applications to C# (Web API, web app)
• Report development and risk management systems (C#, API interfaces, databases)
• Document archive (API interfaces, databases)

Team size: 9 people

• Reports for Risk and Credit Management Development and maintenance of report structures to support risk and credit decisions, including data modeling, validation, and automated delivery for business departments.
• Migration and maintenance of a legacy system to the latest version of .NET for the asset management system Planning and execution of the modernization of an existing asset management system, including code refactoring, performance optimization, test automation, and sustainable maintenance after migration.
• Replacement of the COM-based archive connection with a REST API Redevelopment of the connection of the document archive (HYPARCHIV) to a REST API based on OpenAPI/Swagger, including archiving with index and stamp fields as well as PDF export into the customer portal.
• Redesign of payment receipt processing Replacement of an existing Oracle PL/SQL process with a new implementation in C# based on a business concept, including business alignment, data modeling, and test coverage.
• Design and implementation of tests, creation of deployment pipelines, and documentation
• Further development and implementation of change requests.
• Regular code reviews within the team as well as optimization of application scalability and stability

Technologies: C#, .NET 10, ASP.NET, Unit of Work, IoC, Three-Tier Architecture, Entity Framework Core, DB First, Web API, Swagger, OpenAPI, Python, Oracle, HYPARCHIV, Azure, PowerBI, DevOps, AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service), GIT, xUnit, NSubstitute, TypeScript, Vue.js, Pinia,

Methods: agile development using Scrum

• Migration of customer data from a private cloud to AWS
• Optimizing data transformation jobs and migration from Talend to AWS Glue
• Automation of all migration steps
• Used technologies: AWS, Python, Lambda, CloudFormation, SQLServer, AWS Stepfunctions, Glue, PySpark

• Developing a professional appointment planner for organizations with specific, detailed requirements
• Evaluating various existing software solutions
• Creating a list of technical requirements
• Implementing these requirements
• Technologies under consideration: WebDAV, CalDAV, Rust, Baikal, OAuth, Keycloak

• Environment: AWS, Ruby on Rails, GraphQL, React Native
• Penetration test for Backend, Android-App and iOS-App