Munich, Bavaria, Germany
Senior engineering leader with 10+ years driving technology strategy, building platform infrastructure, scalable systems, and high-performing teams across high-growth European B2B SaaS, Fintech, and e-commerce companies. Currently leading backend engineering at Qonto across two domains (groups of teams), where I've grown from a payments system platform to owning the entire core banking infrastructure - managing 45+ engineers across 7 distributed teams. Delivered platform engineering at scale: in-house card processor achieving 7-figure cost savings, new acquiring product lines (payment links, tap-to-pay) reaching >100% MoM growth, and GenAI-powered operational tools via API-first microservices architecture, cloud infrastructure (AWS), and cross-functional leadership and stakeholder management. Previously at Westwing, I grew from Senior Engineer to Director over 7 years, ultimately leading 45 engineers across 3 remote/hybrid tribes (teams of teams). Key achievements include building ML-powered product recommendations that generated €4M annual revenue, building a data platform processing 2B+ monthly events with GDPR compliance, and architecting cloud-native scalable systems achieving 99.9% uptime during 5x traffic events, while maintaining 90%+ engagement during major organisational transformations through transparent communication and strategic planning. My leadership approach focuses on delivering business outcomes through technical excellence. I help organisations achieve measurable results - cost reduction, revenue growth, operational resilience - by building engineering teams that understand both the technical "how" of platform engineering, API design, and cloud architecture, and the business "why" behind their work. This means connecting daily engineering decisions to company strategy, fostering ownership across distributed teams, and maintaining a sustainable delivery pace without sacrificing quality. I develop technical leaders who combine deep expertise in scalable systems and modern infrastructure with strong cross-functional collaboration skills - creating organisations where engineering drives competitive advantage, not just executes requirements.
Leads a 40-person organisation across backend, web, and mobile (Android/iOS) for the Financing, Remuneration, and Ledger domains.
Led backend engineering across two domains (groups of teams) for the core banking platform - payments systems and credit infrastructure of a €4.4B valued B2B fintech unicorn providing business accounts for 600k+ European SMEs. Managed up to 45 distributed engineers and engineering leads across 7 teams. - Led rollout of the in-house card processor via API-first microservices architecture on AWS cloud infrastructure, achieving 7-figure annual cost savings and enabling further optimisation and revenue growth through platform engineering approach. - Launched new acquiring product lines (payment links, tap-to-pay) reaching >100% MoM growth through strategic partnership, expanding business capabilities and opening new revenue streams. - Drove GenAI integration initiative for on-duty engineer support, directing teams to build agentic workflows that automate alert investigation and bug resolution, improving system reliability through AI/ML integration. - Drove cross-functional operating model following organisational restructure, establishing business review cadence and KPI-driven decision-making framework that improved Product-Engineering alignment, now supporting broader organisational adoption. - Designed and implemented a structured performance management framework with career ladder alignment and evidence-based evaluation criteria, achieving org-wide adoption across the Product Engineering department and improving calibration decision quality. - Expanded leadership scope from payments-only platform to entire core banking infrastructure, improving on-time delivery three-fold across distributed teams while absorbing additional organisational responsibility.
Focused on leadership development and identifying roles aligned with cultural and organisational values.
Directed engineering for greenfield payment service provider platform, leading a group of 25, including leads, engineers, and product managers, to build a central PSP API abstraction layer for €1.5B revenue e-commerce platform and B2B system SCAYLE. - Led software engineering, DevOps, infrastructure, and security teams managing APIs and internal web systems, Terraform, Kubernetes, cloud security architecture, and Datadog observability for a payment processing platform. - Cut development timelines by 50% through SDK refactoring and architecture simplification, improving engineering velocity and reducing technical debt. - Reduced cloud infrastructure costs by 30% through proactive capacity forecasting and infrastructure optimisation. - Restructured team organisation to a business- and architecture-aligned model, improving delivery speed and cross-functional collaboration.
Led 45 engineers across 3 tribes for €500M revenue Home & Living e-commerce platform, owning strategy, delivery, and leadership development across marketing (acquisition and retention), product information management, and search and recommendations. - Delivered ML-driven product recommendations by assembling a cross-functional team (combining external data science specialists with internal software engineers) and launching an iterative A/B testing strategy, generating €4M annualised GMV uplift. - Led partner selection, proof of concept, and implementation of customer data platform (CDP) processing 2B+ monthly events with GDPR compliance, gaining C-level approval for org-wide data strategy that improved governance and reduced system complexity. - Led fullstack software engineering teams, DevOps, and QA, establishing quality assurance frameworks and infrastructure standards across 3 tribes. - Maintained 90%+ engagement during reorganisation and team size reduction through transparent communication, clear strategic direction, and zero resignations. - Directed Black Friday readiness across the entire Tech department in collaboration with cross-functional business stakeholders, ensuring 100% uptime with 5x traffic through AWS cloud infrastructure optimisation, load testing, and coordinated real-time monitoring during the event. - Reorganised one of the tribes from 3 to 2 teams, streamlining operations and aligning to business value streams, while improving stakeholder collaboration through monthly business reviews and reports, achieving higher satisfaction scores among both teams and stakeholders in regular surveys. - Developed senior technical talent, mentoring a principal engineer and director-level successor into leadership roles.
Grew engineering organisation from 10 engineers across 3 teams to 45 engineers across 3 tribes for €500M revenue Home & Living e-commerce platform, leading reorganisation and AWS cloud migration. - Led AWS migration of core monolithic systems, achieving 99.9% uptime with zero customer impact, improving infrastructure flexibility and resilience. - Drove architecture reviews for SEO platform modernisation, replatforming from WordPress to a modern Next.js-based server-side rendered stack, improving performance and SEO capabilities. - Supported reorganisation of 200+ Tech organisation into tribes as part of CTO's management team, improving collaboration and stakeholder satisfaction to 75%+ in directly led areas. - Scaled one of the tribes by doubling its size from 13 to 26 engineers, expanding from 2 to 5 development teams and adding dedicated DevOps and QA engineers, boosting delivery efficiency by 25%. - Established KPI-driven management practices across teams and formalised improvement processes, reducing cycle times by 25% while sharing best practices company-wide in alignment with the CTO's strategic initiative. - Managed infrastructure across all tribes, reducing cloud costs by 20% and eliminating all critical security alerts through proactive capacity optimisation and systematic security remediation.
Led 3 teams of 8-13 engineers responsible for customer communication, search visibility, and discovery features, with primary focus on recovering and scaling the company's SEO capabilities. - Rebuilt the technical team of 5 engineers and restored SEO visibility post-domain switch, recovering domain authority after improperly executed migration. - Scaled and reorganised the technical SEO function, expanding the team and splitting into 2 dedicated teams to serve different business models and growth needs. - Migrated WordPress-based frontend to React application using WordPress API for SEO pages, modernising frontend architecture while maintaining SEO performance. - Improved internal API uptime to 99.99% on 100M+ monthly requests, eliminating critical issues from multiple per month to zero through enhanced observability and stability improvements. - Implemented KPI-driven tracking process, achieving >80% on-time delivery through weekly metrics reviews and establishing stable team throughput. - Hired 2 Tech Leads externally and promoted 1 engineer into a Tech Lead position, building a leadership bench across teams.
Taught PHP, Symfony 2, and testing principles in an intensive coding bootcamp for career changers transitioning from diverse industries and educational backgrounds. - Delivered hands-on technical instruction to trainees with varied backgrounds, adapting teaching approach to accommodate different learning styles and prior experience levels. - Simplified complex technical concepts, receiving positive feedback for teaching clarity and effectiveness in supporting career transitions into technology.