Software generalist, Head of Engineering at Tchibo
I have built software professionally since 2012, as a developer, architect, tech lead, product owner and engineering manager, most of it as a consultant with Netlight. Today I lead engineering teams at Tchibo and help bring AI into how every engineering team there works. I do my best work in fast-moving teams with clear priorities, and I pass on what I learn whenever I can.
Head of Engineering, May 2025 – today, 1 year 5 months
Leading the webshop engineers, steering the technical initiatives that keep the platform scalable and reliable, and helping drive the AI transformation across engineering.
A leading European multichannel retailer, e-commerce platform and world-class coffee roaster, operating over 900 shops and 24,000 retail points across eight countries.
As Head of Engineering I lead and develop the engineers in the Customer Account, Customer Growth and Product Presentation teams. I am responsible for the growth, mentoring and management of my direct reports and for keeping engineering practice aligned with the delivery of key features.
Beyond my three teams I own overarching technical topics across the digital ecosystem: I steer cross-departmental architecture decisions, ensure the long-term scalability of the microservices landscape and align technical excellence with business objectives.
I am also part of the core team driving the AI transformation and enablement across all engineering departments at Tchibo: we work out how AI changes the way we build and run software, and help every team put it to use in their daily work.
Consultant / Manager, Apr 2016 – May 2025, 9 years 1 month
Consultant to clients, mentor to colleagues and driver of digital transformation, whatever the tech stack, team setup or company size.
Netlight is a consultancy with a strong focus on culture and leadership. It works with some of the largest companies in Europe on their digital transformation.
Coaching & Mentoring, Hiring
Ride Sharing Service
Full Stack Developer, Oct 2024 – Apr 2025, 6 months
Multi-tenant capabilities in the user module, which handles registration, login and profile management, delivered into a live system.
A growing company that stands for mobility and community, with the goal of making cities better places to live. Its fully electric ride-sharing vehicles already serve more than two million people.
Alongside regular development work I advised and coached the team on observability, test automation and continuous delivery.
Product Owner, Team / Tech Lead, Nov 2022 – Jun 2024, 1 year 7 months
Digitalisation of the real estate industry through an IoT suite that makes heating climate-friendly, comfortable and economical for tenants and landlords.
A start-up that makes real estate climate-friendly, comfortable and economical. It digitises and networks buildings on behalf of its customers and has created a flexible enterprise IoT suite that manages data from many millions of sensors.
I was responsible for conceptualising, scoping and planning new features for the customer portal in close collaboration with management, other product owners and my team. In a fast-paced environment that meant providing estimates, risk assessments and opportunities for related products, and translating external requirements into user stories.
As tech lead my first responsibility was to enable the team and each developer to perform and deliver at a high level. I worked closely with the product owner during conception, kept expectations clear towards the team and estimates realistic towards product and management, and made sure technical debt stayed low while we addressed disaster recovery, observability and metrics.
Engineering Manager, Apr 2021 – Nov 2022, 1 year 7 months
Digitalisation of the trade-in process for used machinery with a self-service cross-platform app for partner dealers.
A Hamburg based, international AgTech e-commerce start-up that has been digitalising the market for used agricultural machinery since 2015. It brings transparency to pricing, opens up an otherwise regional market and prevents fraud for farmers and dealers alike.
As engineering manager I supported the company and the team in building a fast, scalable and maintainable solution from scratch for the trade-in process at dealerships. I drove decisions from technology and service selection down to team processes, supported the head of product and engineering in designing the wider IT landscape, mentored and coached the team, and was closely involved in hiring.
Tech Lead & Full Stack Developer, Jan 2020 – Apr 2021, 1 year 3 months
Unifying two platforms into one, as part of the team responsible for the core components.
A German market leader in lottery ticket brokering for the federal lotteries.
The team faced several challenges during the project. I worked on cookie consent, traffic migration and company-wide test systems. My most significant contribution was introducing monitoring and alerting, which created transparency and uncovered previously unknown bugs across the platform. I also designed and built a permission module for simple, extensible permission checks across micro-frontends. By improving our agile process, adding quality gates and insisting on clear acceptance criteria, the team's performance improved noticeably and other teams began reviewing their own processes.
Java, Kotlin, Spring Boot, TypeScript, Angular, SASS, NestJS, Jenkins, Splunk, Datadog, Sentry, Kanban, Unit Testing, Integration Testing, E2E Testing
Aviation MRO
Full Stack Developer, DevOps, Jul 2018 – Jan 2020, 1 year 6 months
A holistic platform that combines many web-based apps for maintenance, repair and overhaul in one place.
A leading provider of maintenance, repair, overhaul and modification services for civil aircraft.
I joined the team responsible for the core frontend and backend components, building Java microservices with Vert.x and Angular components. I noticed the lack of tests early and coached the team on why testing matters for avoiding future problems.
A new Developer Experience team was formed to raise the speed and quality of development across all other teams. There I developed concepts for easy application testing with Cypress, introduced Helm for reproducible deployments on OpenShift, and helped set up SonarQube and Snyk. I also wrote several Prometheus exporters in Go, a Usabilla-to-Jira connector in Kotlin with Quarkus and GraalVM, and a secure way to handle secrets in microservices with HashiCorp Vault. To spread these tools I wrote documentation and blog posts, gave lightning talks and occasionally joined other teams to help them adopt new concepts.
Full Stack Developer & Architect, Apr 2016 – Jul 2018, 2 years 3 months
Digitalisation of the in-store retail system for selling contact lens products in every establishment in the DACH region.
The number one optician company in Germany.
I joined the team for the in-store administration application. We worked with Scrum, and I took part in defining stories, implementation and quality assurance. Over time I became a central point of information for the team and external stakeholders. I stabilised the Selenium test suite with a robust framework and automated runs on the build server, and as part of a performance task force I helped identify the bottlenecks that led to improvements of up to 80 percent.
In 2017 I was picked for a strategically important project: internationalisation. With another developer and a product owner I formed a new team to prepare the application for several countries, with country-specific product portfolios, localisation, logistics and unique features. As technical team lead I guided the team through the project. After two years of almost pure feature work the monolithic backend had become hard to maintain, so I was part of the group that began modularising it, starting with the employee management system. I also made the build pipeline runnable on any operating system with a build script, reducing the dependency on TeamCity, and built a custom build monitor for the teams.
Automatic software recognition for an IT licence compliance product.
Brainwaregroup is an international company headquartered in Switzerland that provides IT service and contract management solutions. Companies like Vodafone, OMV, Linde, Allianz GI and ERGO are long-time customers of its products.
A small development team was struggling to keep up with customer demands while trying to innovate. I was hired to ease that pressure by working on new projects and maintaining existing code. The largest projects were a GUI for the command-line tools, the migration from SourceSafe to Git and the integration of Elasticsearch.
The GUI started as my own idea to make the many command-line tools easier to debug. Its potential was recognised quickly, more features followed, and it is now used across the company.
Version control ran on Visual SourceSafe, whose poor branching and merging made parallel work hard. I introduced Git together with a new workflow and branching model, which the team adopted and appreciated.
To speed up search in the products, I mirrored the database into Elasticsearch and routed search queries there instead, which made results close to instant.
C#, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, .NET Framework, SQL Server
CDON
Developer, Jun 2013 – Sep 2013, 3 months
Introduction of the subscription based membership CDON+.
CDON is one of the leading e-commerce companies in Scandinavia with over two million active customers. They sell movies, music, games, books and electronics among many other things.
In the summer of 2013 I was part of the team that built CDON+, a paid membership with free shipping on orders above SEK 100 and points that turn into a gift card at the end of the year. I was involved in every part of the project: planning, database design, business logic and the user interface.
CDON is one of the leading e-commerce companies in Scandinavia with over two million active customers. They sell movies, music, games, books and electronics among many other things.
In the summer of 2012 CDON hired me to help migrate their legacy .NET WebForms code to .NET MVC, starting with the registration, edit-user and password-recovery pages. The migration was a step towards modernising the site, and the MVC implementation was far easier to test and maintain.
C#, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, .NET Framework, SQL Server
Education
M.Sc. in Engineering
Student, Sep 2009 – Jun 2014, 4 years 9 months
Computer Science and Engineering at Lund University.
Java
Axis Communications
Master Thesis Student, Jan 2014 – Jul 2014, 6 months
Using the Go Programming Language in Practice.
Axis Communications is a Swedish manufacturer of network cameras for the physical security and video surveillance industries. The company is the market leader in this area and operates in several market segments.
At the time Axis wrote most of its software in C and had started to look at more modern languages. My thesis investigated what it would take to introduce Go as the main language for their software. Because the standard Go compiler did not support the architecture used in many Axis products, I also evaluated the Go front end for GCC.
The conclusion: Go is easy to learn, has strong support for concurrent software, and its build tooling is far simpler and faster than C's. Its built-in package manager makes third-party libraries easy to use. The GCC front end, however, was hard to get working with the Axis architecture.
