Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Seasoned agile technical leader and people manager with more than 10 years experience in the startup world (B2B and B2C), including e-commerce and digital platforms. Understands that the IT needs to serve the business, and is passionate about creating business value based on agile and lean approaches. Knows how to interface with business stakeholders and moderate across department silos to solve complex company-wide problems. Has run all aspects of IT function, including setting up productive and aligned development teams, building scalable platforms, saving costs in external infrastructure, and creating efficient processes for office IT. Well versed in finding and retaining the best technical people and managers. Led many change processes, helped several companies scale their agile IT organisations, and guided teams through both growth and cost-cutting phases. Specialties: agile & lean, growing people and organizations, leading change Currently an expert in: Datadog & New Relic (market, pricing, product), as well as cloud cost optimization & FinOps (AWS/GCP) IF YOU WANT TO CONNECT HERE: PLEASE HAVE THE COURTESY TO PROVIDE A REASON. IF YOU ARE RECRUITER - PLEASE READ BEFORE CONTACTING ME If you want to "sell" a candidate to me: DON'T. Please contact our HR team instead. I am overwhelmed with unsolicited mails like that and consider it spam. If you want to talk about a potential position for me: I am not actively looking, but might be interested to talk - if the position is in Berlin and for a fairly large team.
2024-now: Global Enterprise Technology Services 2022-2024: Platform Staff Functions 2020-2021: Global Cloud Services 2018-2019: Global Tech In my current position at Delivery Hero I lead the Enterprise Technology Services unit for our central Headquarter in Germany and all group companies in Europe, APAC, and Turkey. Our mission is to make all employees productive from day one, and be the technology provider of the company. We provide a range of services from the IT Service Desk (global and local), office and DMart infrastructure, endpoint management, and enterprise software solutions (3rd party SaaS and in-house). Before this, I worked on managing and optimising global cloud cost (FinOps), running a majority of finance activities in Tech at group level (Tech Controlling: budgeting, capitalisation, procurement support etc.), and standardising the use of third-party cloud tools in the group (Post Merger Integration). In the past, I have also helped lead or create multiple central functions in the group, including Cloud Security, SRE, Agile Coaching, Tech Controlling, FinOps, Developer Advocacy. I have helped save many millions of Euros of cloud cost over the years, for example through large cloud contract negotiations ( > 500m EUR) and FinOps practices like capacity reservations.
Wimdu is one of the world’s largest online holiday rental marketplaces. * responsible for IT department (agile leadership, people management, recruiting, software development, infrastructure) * P&L responsibility, reporting to CEO, part of company management team * hired 30 senior tech staff in 9 months from all over the world, while maintaining a great engineering culture, based on trust, craftsmanship, and knowledge sharing * successfully built a lightweight, scaled agile organisation based on LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum) * leading architecture migration from huge Rails monolith to microservices, and infrastructure migration to AWS * strongly aligned the IT with company's business KPIs * Tech Stack: Ruby, Rails, MySQL, Redis, React, Microservices, REST APIs, RabbitMQ, Docker, AWS
People Management, Recruiting, Agile Leadership. Responsible for all feature teams and the mobile app team.
Responsibilities • management and recruiting of a team of 4-6 backend developers, worked in Ruby/RoR lead development role and responsible for backend IT platform, office and server infrastructure • planning of technical strategy and software architecture, advised the two technical co-founders • roadmap planning and product specifications, in cooperation with product management • management of Scrum process, definition of QA standards and work processes Achievements • created reliable IT work processes, increased IT productivity and team satisfaction • successfully established core team practices like Scrum, continuous integration, TDD, regular pair programming, shared code ownership and constant knowledge sharing • created strong team culture based on agile values, craftsmanship and trust, where people are highly focused on quality and proud of the products they build • successfully envisioned and finished two migration projects to fundamentally simplify codebase, shrink infrastructure for backend apps and speed up mobile app creation workflows, reducing internal support time and generating savings of about 1 FTE/year in both IT and Fulfillment Team • defined and helped implement new infrastructure philosophy based on DevOps culture that transformed this area from major company risk to non-issue
Development of various Rails applications, APIs and client-side apps. Introduced Kanban and Continuous Integration. Technologies: Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, Redis, Sproutcore, REST, SOAP, XML, JSON.
Development and operation of an international deal and price search portal for game downloads, based on Zend Framework. Developed an extensive framework for importing prices and deals from all major online game shops (Apple, Steam, Gamersgate etc.). Built international, user-focused site for comparing deals and prices for game downloads. Built a company from the ground up together with business partner, focused on US market from Germany. Responsible for all technical development and operations. Platform and assets sold to another company in 2013.
Responsibilities • responsible for IT and infrastructure (German HQ and online shops in 15 countries) • led global software development for Magento platform used in 15 countries (definition of development standards and methods, QA, migration to new custom Magento platform, supported international roll-outs, focused on performance optimization) • extended infrastructure for international online shops (optimized stability and performance, established DevOps mindset, focused on better server utilization and virtualization, introduced Amazon EC2) • set up office infrastructure for German HQ from scratch for 150 employees (set up internal servers with Active Directory, central backups, and central Business Intelligence solution for all country offices) • team setup and recruiting, management of 20 employees (developers, administrators and Scrum Masters) Achievements • established professional development methods with coding guidelines, Continuous Integration, automated browser/unit tests, agile development (Scrum/Kanban), release management and focused on building a team structure in line with these principles • put IT „back on track“ after development got stuck (technical debt, insufficient stakeholder management) and re-enabled development cycle • established broad IT management perspective in the company (developed strategy for building and fostering IT team, secured long-term ability of IT team to deliver software, started setting up reliable infrastructure for German HQ)