Fractional CTO, Principal Architect, 20 years of experience

Building the future of selling digital products and innovating entrepreneurship. SaaS, Fintech, E-commerce. Series A 32M€+

Achievements:

• Doubled delivery speed by reorganizing functional teams into smaller cross-functional units for 80+ FTEs (around 10 direct reports), including both in-house and remote teams.
• Optimized cloud costs by reducing database expenses by 70%.
• Developed a solid technical and product strategy for the international expansion
• Full CI/CD integration, reducing automation test runtime from 60 minutes to 15 minutes.
• Stabilized the release process, reducing the number of incidents by 300%.
• As a public speaker at numerous technical events, I built a strong company brand, which helped us hire more than 30 people within one year (using only our internal talent acquisition team) from companies like Shopify, Solarisbank, Adjust, and Marley Spoon.

Other responsibilities:

• Scaling technology platforms in a high-growth, scale-up environment (over 70,000 businesses use our platform).
• Establishing a strong culture of transparency, diversity, and regular, honest feedback across the department.
• Identifying and mitigating potential risks associated with technology development, including technical debt, resource constraints, and regulatory compliance issues.
• Creating development handbooks and best practices from scratch across the entire engineering organization.
• Responsible for developing robust and scalable system architectures to ensure the company's technology solutions are designed to accommodate growth and adapt to evolving requirements.
• Establishing and monitoring KPIs for the engineering team, measuring progress towards goals and identifying areas for improvement.
• Conducting technical due diligence of external companies for potential acquisitions.
• Promoting continuous learning and providing opportunities for training and mentorship.

• Shaping the future architecture of payments at the hottest payment Unicorn of Europe
• Working on the technical strategy for the enterprise architectural vision of the company, including the API integrations and connection of the acquired companies into the Unzer One platform

#Insurtech, #Healthcare, #Animal insurance #Startup, #Zurich, #B2B, #B2C, #SaaS, #AffiliateMarketing

• Managing engineering teams, with building from scratch next generation insurance products for dental health. Team consists of Frontend, Backend developers, DevOps, QA Automation engineers, Freelancers, etc.
• Building API platform, as a SaaS solution for the other insurance partners, as DA-Direct and Zurich group
• Building software architecture of the product, developing and applying best code practices for the teams. Continuous code review
• Preparing technical due diligence, which played a big role for acquiring company by Zurich (in the TOP 10 world insurance companies)
• Planning budgets for the team and infrastructure
• Coaching and mentoring team members, through 1:1s and honest feedback
• Representing company from the tech side for the investors
• Effective management of the remote and in-house teams, using Agile approaches (scrum, kanban, etc)
• Building scalable microservices with teams
• Building scalable affiliate marketing service
• Applying GDPR rules to the services and infrastructure

• Managing engineering team, with building service for students for different universities, from scratch
• Hiring new team members
• Building software architecture of the project and main core functionality
• Creating best practices for teams, continuous code review, code style guides
• Using Agile methodologies to manage team (scrum, kanban, etc)
• Developing tech-focused company culture

Project Leadership Spearheaded development teams across multiple sectors, including Logistics, FinTech, Healthcare, and Real Estate, ensuring high-quality deliverables for clients in the US and EU.

Client Collaboration Worked as the main technical contact, helping clients understand how their business needs could be turned into technical solutions.

Team Management Managed and mentored cross-functional engineering teams, fostering a collaborative environment and driving continuous improvement in coding standards and development practices.

Technical Strategy Developed and executed technical strategies, aligning project goals with the latest industry trends and best practices to optimize performance and scalability.

Multi-Project Coordination Successfully balanced multiple projects simultaneously, ensuring timely delivery and maintaining high standards across diverse industries.

System Architecture Designed and implemented robust, scalable system architectures tailored to specific industry needs, from secure payment gateways in FinTech to compliance-focused healthcare systems.

Code Review & Quality Assurance Led code reviews and established QA processes, ensuring code quality, security, and adherence to regulatory requirements across all projects.

Agile Methodologies Championed Agile and Scrum methodologies, improving team productivity, adaptability, and responsiveness to changing project requirements.

Technology Stack Optimization Evaluated and selected the appropriate technology stacks for each project, maximizing efficiency and future-proofing systems.

Stakeholder Communication Provided clear, regular updates to stakeholders, bridging the gap between technical teams and business leaders to align expectations and deliver value.

Skills: Consulting · Outsourcing · Insurtech · SaaS · FinTech · Remote Work · Logistics Management