Technical Debt Experts 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.

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

CRM and revenue platform managing billing and subscription workflows.

• Scaled payments infrastructure across data products, direct debit expansion and automated abuse prevention, generating $416K in annualized operational savings ($8K/week) by eliminating redundant gateway calls.
• Owned backlog and sprint execution for autonomous checkout abuse detection pipelines, designing real-time risk guardrails and velocity heuristics that blocked card testing attacks.
• Architected enterprise billing migrator user stories and data reconciliation mechanisms, achieving zero-downtime subscription state transitions and cutting $60K in infrastructure overhead.
• Expanded European direct debit (SEPA) payment capabilities, managing cross-squad API dependencies and automated webhook error-handling to eliminate checkout friction.

• Analysis of the existing CAN communication between microcontrollers
• Analysis of the sensors used and the measured values collected
• Planning the CAN messages for transmitting the measured values
• Iterative adjustment of the microcontroller code to the new CAN messages
• Cross-compilation from x64 to arm64

Assessment of the product, delivery, and AI organization with a realignment of operational excellence, target architecture, and AI-first operating model

Situation: The product and delivery organization showed structural weaknesses in efficiency, control, and collaboration. In addition, there was no clear target architecture for AI-driven product and organizational development. At leadership level, there was limited transparency regarding roles, responsibilities, and operational performance.

Responsibility & approach:

• Analysis of the existing product, delivery, and organizational structures in terms of processes, governance, and controllability
• Evaluation of architecture and platform with regard to scalability, future readiness, and AI integration
• Development of a target picture for an AI-first product and delivery operating model
• Derivation of concrete measures to improve operational excellence and collaboration
• Sparring with the leadership team on structured organizational development

Results & impact:

• Creation of transparency regarding structural bottlenecks, performance, and decision-making logic
• Development of a target structure for a scalable AI-first product and delivery setup
• Improvement of decision-making capability and control at leadership level
• Creation of a solid basis for downstream transformation measures
• Definition of concrete levers to improve efficiency, collaboration, and time-to-market

• Led the end-to-end architecture and migration of a legacy on- premise IoT monitoring system to a cloud-native Azure platform within a 17-member development team
• Designed and implemented a scalable microservices architecture (Java 21, Spring Boot, Kubernetes, Azure Services), decoupling IoT data streams and eliminating legacy system bottlenecks
• Defined technology stack, mentored developers, and orchestrated cross-functional teams in 4 countries to ensure high-quality delivery and alignment with architectural standards
• Drove requirements engineering and system redesign, removing years of technical debt and introducing event-driven processing and automated workflows
• Key Achievements
• Increased system stability and uptime by ~10x, eliminating need for 24/7 DevOps intervention
• Reduced hosting costs by ~80% (5x savings) through cloud optimization
• Improved performance and scalability, enabling stable handling of high-volume IoT data streams
• Delivered successful zero-disruption migration from on-prem to cloud, with strong user satisfaction and reliability from day one

• Led end-to-end delivery of complex international customer-facing IT and system transformation projects across mobility, retail, life sciences, and product development domains.

• Managed project opportunities and delivery initiatives from concept development, planning, execution, migration, validation, deployment, and final customer acceptance.

• Acted as the primary point of contact for project stakeholders, ensuring alignment between customers, business units, suppliers, and delivery teams.

• Ensured timely project execution through proactive monitoring of milestones, deliverables, dependencies, risks, and resource requirements.

• Led and coordinated global cross-functional teams of 20+ members across multiple time zones. Served as the central coordination point for project activities, ensuring accountability, milestones, progress tracking, and timely resolution of issues across multiple stakeholders. Managed status reporting with all the stakeholders, providing clear and timely updates to ensure alignment on project goals.

• Provided functional leadership, mentoring, coaching, and issue resolution support to project team members. Worked closely with senior leadership and executive stakeholders to define project charter and project scope, priorities, milestones, manage dependencies, success criteria and achieve project goals.

• Collaborated closely with senior leadership, business stakeholders, suppliers, operations teams, and external partners to define project objectives and ensure successful execution.

• Managed stakeholder communication through executive dashboards, KPIs, governance reviews, steering committee meetings, and project status reporting.

• Anticipated business needs and provided effective technical solutions in a timely manner to improve business satisfaction.

• Led and supported sub-project management structures, ensuring consistent execution, reporting, and escalation across complex initiatives.

• Managed supplier relationships and service providers to ensure compliance with contractual obligations, service levels, timelines, and quality expectations.

• Supported vendor selection processes, RFP evaluations, delivery governance, cost monitoring, and performance reviews.

• Controlled project budgets, forecasts, resource allocations, and financial tracking to ensure delivery within approved constraints.

• Scheduled workshops explaining the business requirement, prioritizing project goals and managing change.

• Oversaw cloud migrations (Azure/ AWS), database migrations/upgrades, system upgrades, infrastructure & application modernization, data management, legacy decommissioning initiatives, AI solutioning, transition plan of 2000+ applications etc.

• Coordinated execution, deployment, integration, commissioning, data migration and handover activities to ensure production readiness.

• Led a cross-functional team proactively managing dependencies and resolving project issues to closure, while maintaining delivery timelines.

• Proactively managed project risks, dependencies, issues, change requests, and escalations to ensure predictable project outcomes.

• Ensured compliance with GxP, ITIL, corporate governance standards, validation requirements, and audit controls.

• Led internal and external audit support activities, validation documentation, CAPA coordination, and regulatory compliance initiatives.

• Drove process standardization, automation, and governance improvements across project delivery functions.

• Led application rationalization initiatives resulting in the retirement of more than 50 legacy applications, improving operational efficiency and reducing maintenance costs.

• Currently driving Generative AI initiatives to automate project documentation, reporting, knowledge management, and delivery processes.

• Facilitated lessons learned workshops and implemented continuous improvement actions to enhance project execution effectiveness.

Following the Vaillant engagement, established independent practice focused on senior SAP advisory and building ASTRA — a methodology, not a tool. ASTRA is independent and unbiased: the same four pillars serve CIO / Business Leadership, SI / SAP Practice, and Programme Director / Principal with equal weight. No audience is primary.

ASTRA serves three audiences with equal weight — CIO / Business Leadership · SI / SAP Practice · Programme Director / Principal. ASTRA is independent and unbiased — it does not sit inside any SI practice and does not serve any single audience as primary customer. Each audience receives a role-calibrated output from the same analysis.

One methodology, two outcomes:

OUTCOME 1 — SAP TRANSFORMATION GOVERNANCE:

Any active SAP programme: ECC→S/4HANA Greenfield, Brownfield, Global Rollout, AMS. The four pillars answer the four questions that determine whether a transformation succeeds — for any of the three audiences.

• Are business requirements clean — or is the SI building what SAP standard already covers? (Functional Auditor → all three audiences)
• Is the custom object inventory healthy — or accumulating debt that blocks upgrades? (RICEFW Auditor → Director and CIO)
• Is the SteerCo reporting accurate — or is leadership seeing a Watermelon? (Truth Engine → CIO and Director)
• Are people ready for the system they are receiving? (Human Signal → CIO and Director)

OUTCOME 2 — AUTONOMOUS ENTERPRISE READINESS:

Any programme deploying Joule, pursuing RISE, or planning an AE migration. The same four pillars answer the questions SAP does not — again, calibrated per audience.

• Which custom objects block the 224 Joule AI agents? (RICEFW Auditor → SI gets remediation paths, Director gets verdicts, CIO gets financial impact)
• Is the Fiori deployment complete enough to activate Joule? (Truth Engine → all three audiences)
• Is the workforce trained for AI-native working? (Human Signal → CIO and Director)

Four pillars (each serves all three audiences):

• Functional Auditor: Clean Core Score 0–100. Section A (CIO): KG fidelity risk in €. Section B (Director): SI challenge questions, man-day saving. Section C (SI): Language Translation Ledger, SAP alternatives.
• RICEFW Auditor: Joule API Pathway Audit, Clean Core Level A–D, Technical Debt Index 1–10. Section A: financial impact of blocked AI agents. Section B: RETIRE/MIGRATE/REDESIGN/KEEP verdicts. Section C: BTP remediation paths.
• Truth Engine: Watermelon Detection, Fiori Deployment check, Programme Truth Score 0–100. Section A: 3 SteerCo questions. Section B: 48-hour action list. Section C: vendor friction map.
• Human Signal: three-stage Fiori adoption model, HITL Policy readiness, Human Signal Score 0–100. Section A: GUI training weight, AE adoption financial risk. Section B: go-live recommendation, stakeholder resistance map.

On-Demand SAP Advisory:

• SAP Programme Management — end-to-end governance, factory management, multi-stream delivery, vendor oversight, SteerCo reporting for Greenfield, Brownfield, Rollout and AMS programmes.
• Delivery Management — RICEFW oversight, Data Migration governance, Release & Cutover management, Hypercare, SLA/KPI management.
• Due Diligence & Landscape Assessment — SAP landscape review, AS-IS/TO-BE roadmap, RFP structuring, SI selection advisory.
• IT Strategy & CIO Advisory — transformation roadmap, Clean Core strategy, Autonomous Enterprise readiness planning.
• Programme Recovery — distressed programme assessment, rapid governance setup, escalation resolution.

Operating through senior professional networks across EMEA.

• 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.

• Agile coach and scrum master in property insurance/underwriting for Allianz Technology
• Team 1: Kanban/Scrumban team in DevOps mode – new features, distributed monolith to microservices, reduction of technical debt & refactoring, implementation of CI/CD, expansion of automated testing
• Team 2: SAFe team – greenfield service for global software and German adaptation, AI integration (Cythora)
• Scrum trainings, scrum manuals in Confluence, all ceremonies, establishment of an experimental just culture, team replacement and scaling from 7 to 20
• Requirements engineering, prioritization via business value for product owners, risk identification
• Project budget management, JIRA monitoring and automation, steering committee support, test strategy
• SAFe integration, PI planning, flight levels and road mapping

• Building independent projects in the AI/developer tools space.
• Experimenting with product ideas, rapid prototyping, and go-to-market validation.
• Designing AI-native operating model—leveraging agentic pipelines, living context schemas, and rigorous eval harnesses to multiply individual contributor leverage and eliminate implementation bottlenecks.

• Digital and print media designer, specialist focus: digital media, PHP development, TYPO3
• PHP, MySQL programming
• Full-stack (frontend & backend programming)
• IT consulting
• Web hosting, consulting, and IT services
• Software and internet projects
• IT system administration
• Linux and Mac system administration

• Partner directly with C-level leadership (CEO, CAIO, CTO) on architecture, OKR strategy, and cross-team roadmap prioritization, translating strategic goals into structured engineering requirements.
• Surfaced and mapped technical debt across the entire organization with C-level leadership and co-defined a prioritized remediation strategy, balancing debt paydown against feature delivery.
• Led code reviews and technical standards across the team, fostering a mentor-first environment with two-way feedback dialogue — pairing on complex pipeline work and unblocking junior engineers on async architecture patterns.
• Re-architected the AI companion's core processing pipeline from synchronous to asynchronous with a queue-based worker architecture, enabling horizontal scalability and cutting upload processing time ~4x (from ~22s to 5–10s) while improving response accuracy.
• Designed an AI-driven document intelligence workflow with automatic multi-document classification, per-document summarization, and relevance guardrails for the patient care journey.
• Built a unified patient memory system (short- and long-term context) bridging the document vault and chatbot into a single bidirectional, context-aware platform.

• Building an AI-native coaching platform for cyclists: a conversational Dynamic Coach that turns training and recovery data into the next session decision, available daily instead of a static calendar.

• Designed and shipped a full-stack, chat-first coaching experience on Next.js and the Vercel Edge Network, with agentic workflows that adapt plans in real time to readiness, load, and life constraints.

• Built integrations with Garmin, Strava, Whoop, and intervals.icu so sleep, HRV, and ride data feed coaching recommendations without manual data entry.

• Product thesis: make high-quality coaching principles accessible at scale by combining adaptive training logic with plain-language conversation, not another metrics dashboard.