Hans-Gunther Schmidt

Senior Director of Engineering (Content) at Meltwater

Berlin, Berlin, Germany

About

Hello, I am Hans, a Software Engineer by heart who turned Engineering Manager. I am a husband, father of 2 incredible sons, BMX- and Skateboard Street style late-beginner and I live in the beautiful city of Berlin, Germany. I strongly believe in the UNIX way and still conquer most daily tasks via simple shell commands. But where more structure was required, I managed to get the job done with a variety of programming languages ranging from Java, Scala, Golang, Elixir, (too much) Javascript and a few more when required. I have always considered myself a polyglot backend developer with strong DevOps & architecture skills; my expertise ranges from building backend services, defining and designing APIs, stream processing on high-volume bus systems and querying large, non-relational data stores. But I have also spent significant time on building Google Android apps or Mobile Web applications in AngularJS. On my new & exciting path to engineering management at Meltwater, I am shifting focus to empowering individual engineers, engineering managers and engineering teams to efficiently build large data through-put solutions that, in the end, serve a myriad of customer use-cases and help our customers make the right business decisions, day by day.

Experience

  • Meltwater (Full-time · 13 yrs 3 mos)
    • Senior Director of Engineering
      Apr 2026 - Present · 3 mos

      Same, same, but different!

    • Director of Software Engineering
      Nov 2021 - Mar 2026 · 4 yrs 5 mos

      Heading Meltwater's Content organization with a focus on content ingestion through (AI-based) crawling and fetching solutions. Engineering Manager for 6 engineering teams with varying stacks (Java, Golang, Python).

    • Senior Software Engineering Manager
      Oct 2019 - Dec 2021 · 2 yrs 3 mos

      Heading Meltwater's Content organization with a focus on content ingestion through (AI-based) crawling and fetching solutions. Senior Eng Manager for 4 engineering teams with varying stacks (Java, Golang, Angular) Oct '19 - Jan '21: Senior Engineering Manager for the Content Integrations org at Meltwater. Responsible for 3 teams with varying stacks (Golang, Java, Kotlin, Ruby, Elixir, Nodejs) with a focus on data ingestion solutions.

  • Founder at apitrary
    Dec 2011 - Apr 2014 · 2 yrs 5 mos

    Building up a backend as a service company, focusing auto-generated REST APIs for mobile (and web) clients.

  • Backend Developer at Deutsche Telekom Products & Innovations
    Sep 2012 - Feb 2013 · 6 mos

    Backend development in a Spring-based Java application.

  • Android Developer at Netzwiese / BSR - Berliner Stadtreinigung
    May 2012 - Jul 2012 · 3 mos

    Development of BSR's Android App, available in Google Play.

  • Backend Developer at CloudControl
    Nov 2011 - May 2012 · 7 mos

    Backend development of cloudControl's cloud plattform on Amazon Web Services (AWS).