Technical Debt Experts in Berlin

Led FP&A tech transformation for a 9-figure business – from resolving legacy technical debt to leading AI-native EPM implementation

• Driving end-to-end FP&A transformation, from architecture redesign through EPM tool selection to rollout
• Ran evaluation of 12+ EPM platforms, from vendor negotiation to selection framework tied to long-term planning
• Diagnosed constraints in financial planning architecture, presented findings to the CFO, and secured executive mandate to redesign FP&A infrastructure from the ground up

• Savills is one of the world's leading property advisors with 700+ offices worldwide. In Berlin, I built core digital solutions for the valuation business, replacing legacy Access-based workflows with an enterprise-grade web app built on Vue.js.
• Frontend Architecture & Scalability: Designed scalable Vue + TypeScript frontend architecture for internal enterprise applications, integrating a Symfony backend and interactive maps.
• Legacy Modernization: Led the modernization of legacy jQuery-based systems into maintainable Vue-driven applications, improving performance, maintainability, and efficiency across business workflows.
• PDF Report Workflow Automation: Engineered Twig-based automated PDF generation pipelines that reduced manual report preparation time by ~80%, saving approximately 12h per analyst/month.
• Design System & Frontend: Built a scalable SASS-based design system using mixins, maps, functions, and reusable UI patterns for consistency and long-term maintainability.

• Moss is a spend-management platform for SMEs that bundles corporate cards, web-based applications and reimbursements, AP/procurement and advanced accounting in one place.
• Splits time across Accounting, Spending and Growth tribes, handling requirements gathering, public product design, coding, testing, debugging and internal apps.
• Participates in development and maintenance of the design system/UI kit and supports tooling, documentation and developer experience.
• Builds form-heavy UIs, drawer-based editing, high-density/resilient tables with server-side filters, pagination, column configurations, CSV/Excel export and bulk operations, all wired for permissions and auditability.
• Works with complex cross-entity relationships without a single-schema solution.
• Uses React, Redux Toolkit, styled-components, react-hook-form, React PDF, Vite, Lokalise, React Testing Library and Playwright.

Led product strategy, cross-functional delivery, and the evolution of the platform and operating model at a VC-backed B2B SaaS company (~60 FTE at peak) operating a multi-sided enforcement platform — connecting brand owners, marketplace operators, and enforcement workflows — scaling from founding-stage concept to commercially validated product.

PRODUCT STRATEGY & BUSINESS IMPACT

• Defined and iterated product strategy aligned to ICP refinement, competitive positioning, and long-term revenue growth
• Refined segment focus to concentrate capacity on highest-value enforcement use cases, improving customer retention and average contract value
• Redesigned pricing and packaging after identifying that a modular, feature-based model was enabling customer cherry-picking and creating confusion at the point of sale. Collapsed a multi-page pricing structure into a single-page, outcome-based model — anchored on what the customer actually wanted to protect, not which modules they selected. Contributed directly to a 10× ACV increase on a key account (€500 → €5,000/month)
• Replaced ad-hoc stakeholder-driven prioritisation with a structured decision framework — coupling OKR alignment, ICE scoring, and a fixed roadmap split (50% strategic initiatives / 30% customer feedback / 20% tech debt) — ending a pattern where sales requests and leadership interventions routinely displaced planned work mid-quarter
• Redesigned the customer onboarding process after identifying a recurring failure pattern: misaligned sales commitments, missing customer-side inputs, and siloed handoffs between sales, CS, and product were routinely delaying time-to-value. Introduced structured pre-onboarding requirements and cross-functional handoff protocols — ensuring customers arrived with the data needed to go live, and internal teams operated from a shared baseline

LEADERSHIP, DELIVERY & OPERATING MODEL

• Built and led a 20-person cross-functional organisation spanning product management, engineering, design, and operations
• Introduced OKR-driven planning and quarterly review cadences, providing consistent strategic alignment across functions and seniority levels
• Built decision-routing frameworks that pushed operational and product decisions down to team level — replacing a pattern where analysts and PMs escalated routine calls (e.g. enforcement actions, edge-case handling) to leadership by default. Defined clear ownership boundaries and decision criteria so the team could act independently on the vast majority of cases, freeing leadership capacity for genuinely non-standard situations

AI-ENABLED PRODUCT & WORKFLOW TRANSFORMATION

• Led the development of an AI-enabled website detection system that replaced much of a previously manual review process, reducing analyst workload by 70–90%
• Redesigned key operational workflows to incorporate AI-enabled classification and decision routing, increasing detection throughput 20× without linear cost growth
• Defined AI product KPIs covering coverage, accuracy, and false positive rate — embedding measurable quality standards into the development cycle
• Defined where automation should replace, support, or escalate human decisions, balancing scale, quality, and customer-facing risk

• Built a JTBD-based prioritization framework for 3,000+ accumulated feature requests, identified 27 broker jobs, validated 8 through 25 user interviews, and used the resulting job map as a live prioritization filter for all incoming channels (Upvoty, CSAT, consulting tickets).
• Responsible for the Scout24 Lighthouse initiative: Document Intelligence with full RAG architecture (semantic chunking, bge-m3 embeddings, pgvector, BM25+Dense hybrid retrieval).
• Reduced lead time of customer feature requests to 3.1 days through code analysis, ticket specification, and independent implementation using a coding agent (Codex).
• Developed an LLM-based support agent (GPT-4o mini, Codex-generated merge requests) that reduced 3rd-level escalations from 40% to 5% of all monthly tickets.
• Integrated six partners through technical coordination, specification, backlog and release management, and led seven full stack developers.
• Eliminated regulatory exposure for brokers in six weeks through risk analysis (BGH ruling on distance selling/GDPR), new audit features, and coordination with legal and data protection officers.

• Developed and implemented organization-wide discovery framework based on Ulwick’s Outcome-Driven Innovation; enabled 7 Product Owners to systematically identify and quantify unrealized value through shared outcome language and opportunity scoring methodology
• Transformed Product Owner role from backlog clerks to strategic experimenters; established dedicated time budget for autonomous hypothesis testing and discovery activities
• Rebuilt customer journey maps to start at actual user need (tool selection phase) instead of platform entry point; eliminated manual data aggregation work previously done by project teams
• Implemented OKR framework across 4 product teams; defined quarterly objectives with measurable key results (e.g., 40% reduction in manual integration effort, self-service adoption increase)
• Unified 3 separate platform roadmaps through cross-team dependency mapping and shared service agreements
• Supported enterprise sales cycle with ROI modeling and technical due diligence for automotive and defense customers

Java 21 · Spring Boot 3 · Keycloak · PostgreSQL · Docker · Nginx · GitHub Actions · DigitalOcean · React 18 · TypeScript · Plasmo

• Architected and shipped a production-ready Job Application Tracker end-to-end: REST API with 5-stage workflow, pagination, sorting, and dynamic filtering — full ownership from design to live cloud deployment on DigitalOcean.
• Implemented production-grade identity management: OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect / JWT / RBAC via Keycloak, applying Hexagonal Architecture and DDD principles.
• Built automated CI/CD pipeline (GitHub Actions); containerised with Docker; Nginx reverse proxy with path-based routing and SSL termination.
• Developed a Chrome Extension (Plasmo framework, Manifest V3) that auto-fills job applications directly from LinkedIn into the tracker — demonstrates full product thinking across backend API and browser client.

• Own strategy and roadmap for the payment orchestration and risk intelligence products serving enterprise subscription customers.
• Conduct deep workflow discovery and user interviews to redesign onboarding experience, resulting in 5× funnel throughput and 70% reduction in manual steps.
• Define PRDs for scalable data pipelines, fraud signals, and automation logic, improving insight accuracy and speed of decision-making by 30%.
• Partner with engineering, data, design, and security to ship 15+ enterprise features with 100% successful release quality.
• Introduce risk analytics dashboards and performance KPIs, reducing investigation time by 40% and improving visibility across teams.
• Lead prioritization of new capabilities, tech debt, and security initiatives (PCI DSS, access controls, auditability).
• Lead development of ML-based fraud detection models (regression, decision trees) to identify high-risk transactions, reducing chargebacks by 20%.
• Design end-to-end analytics dashboards (Tableau, Redshift) to visualise global risk exposure, cutting onboarding SLA from 2.4 days to 3 minutes.
• Partner with engineering and data teams to deploy scalable payment risk frameworks, enhancing compliance visibility and decision speed.
• Mentor analysts and data scientists through agile sprint cycles, embedding a data-driven culture across risk operations.

• Frontend modernization (multiple client engagements): Angular version upgrades, architecture refactoring, performance optimization, state management restructuring, and UI library consolidation resulting in faster load times and improved end-user experience across all projects.
• Web development: High-performance landing pages and company websites for SMB clients built with Next.js, SvelteKit, PayloadCMS, and TailwindCSS optimized for speed, SEO, and conversion.
• SaaS product development: Architecting and building an AI-powered platform for photography studio operators (PoC phase) with full-stack TypeScript: Angular frontend, NestJS backend, PostgreSQL, LLM integration (Gemini/Claude) for intelligent workflow automation.
• AI integration: Developed a PoC for AI-generated podcast avatars using the Gemini API for content production workflows.
• Angular deep dive workshops: Delivered 20+ workshops (3–5 days each, 8–10 participants) in a hands-on format where participants build a demo application modeled after their real business domain.

• Reporting directly to the CEO.
• Responsible for all things in the engineering space including software engineering, architecture and quality assurance.
• Led a team of around 25 cross functional team members including frontend, backend and fullstack engineers.
• Aligned engineering strategies with organisation strategy through clearly identifiable OKRs.
• Introduced Team Topologies and Scrum, ensuring less hand-offs between teams and improving their efficiencies which resulted in more impactful solutions for our customers.
• Lead the technology due diligence process for an M&A decision.
• Spearheaded the re-architecture of our product from monolith to microservices, reducing technical debt and enabling expansion into new markets.
• Managed a budget of around €2m, optimising costs by introducing SaaS solutions and replacing homegrown systems.
• Negotiated vendor contracts, reducing costs by at least 10% and improving service delivery.
• Set clear expectations and goals for engineers ensuring their continued growth within the organisation.
• Technology stacks included React, Node.js, MongoDB and GCP.

Led backend engineering across core domains (main backend, notifications, medical knowledge base, results processing), owning delivery quality, team growth, and engineering standards.

Signature Outcomes

Shipped a flexible, no-code membership platform (pricing, packages, duration), enabling commercial changes without engineering involvement and keeping membership tiers coherent over time.

Built a high-impact backend team through mentorship, coaching engineers into independent contributors and establishing onboarding documentation that enabled fast ramp-up.

Scaled the team from 2 → 5 engineers while maintaining delivery cadence and code quality; owned hiring pipelines and onboarding.

Partnered closely with Product during design to assess feasibility, sequence work, and make pragmatic trade-offs between speed, tech debt, and long-term maintainability.

Institutionalized testing and simplicity as defaults, enforcing high test coverage and a “simple-first” architecture approach.

Tech & Practices

Stack: Node.js (TypeScript), Express, PostgreSQL; microservices (Node & Go); event-driven async jobs.

Practices: Testing as a release gate, lightweight design reviews, iterative delivery, documentation-driven onboarding.

Compliance & Security: Led implementation of Privacy Officer recommendations (GDPR and German healthcare regulations).

• Participated as a public speaker regarding leadership and transformational topics at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress with 15 thousand visitors.

• Leading the technology and engineering team. Responsible for all engineering, IT strategy, and IT operations (75 FTE in 4 countries, 8M budget)
• Leading the technology part in acquisitions, financing rounds, and post-merger integrations
• Providing bank connectivity via PSD2, scraping, and premium APIs in several markets (EU and MENA)
• Offering Account Information Services (AIS), Payment Initiation Services (PIS), and data enrichment (categorisation, contract recognition, insights, risk indicators)
• Building several complete B2B2C white label neo banking solutions based on external core banking
• Running the market leading account and portfolio switching service
• Operating a private hybrid cloud in a regulated environment across several datacentres (bare-metal, AWS, GCP, client side)

• Under the brands Web.de, GMX, 1und1, and Mail.com, offers email and cloud services used daily by millions on iPhones.
• As part of a 10-person team, added new features, refactored legacy code, and increased test coverage.
• Features: Email and cloud access, compose email, email and cloud sync, news, contact, multiple account management, synchronization, notifications, premium features, ads.
• Technologies used: UIKit, SwiftUI, Combine, VIPER, Unit tests, UI tests, Snapshot tests, Fastlane, Cocoapods, MailCore.