Fractional CTO, Fintech, SaaS, Startups, Rescue and Restructuring

Responsible for the digitalization of complex financial processes by leveraging AI capabilities and stabilizing a technical team with strong engineering culture.

• As a member of the company's senior management, alongside the CEO and COO, I defined and executed the P&L strategy. I rebooted the engineering team by replacing underperforming people, adding flexible engineering profiles for experimental projects, supporting the business, and restructuring the P&L by freezing financially unproductive scopes.
• Actively supporting fundraising by deep-diving into the financial structures, validating the business rationale as helping my peers to focus on strategic business goals:
• Freezing products with no relevant revenue streams
• Prioritizing the pivot toward data products
• Renegotiating vendors
• Cleaning up unproductive SaaS
• Reorganizing the tech org chart into a flexible team reduces committed cash burn
• Created DATA and AI teams and introduced AI specialists who produced core business solutions such as innovative prediction models for financial scoring and digitalization of the baking process.
• Create and execute the fintech compliance requirements accordingly with the authorities (ZAG/BaFin)
• I am responsible for creating and executing a data-driven view to leverage financial services based on transnational data (I can't review which type of data before launching). This view will become a game-changing method for evaluating and managing SMEs' financial risk.
• We formed the first level of engineering leadership by creating cross-functional teams with engineering leads and introduced the concept of platform teams to ensure speed and reliability for business operations.
• With the newly formed engineering team and product, I created a lean strategy for implementing a microservices-based architecture that was made scalable by taking advantage of event-driven design. Migrated existing projects from bare metal to GCP with continuous deployment on a CI/CD pipeline.

Leading an organization with 25+ (+30 outsourced) engineers distributed into small teams led by senior managers and engineer managers and 3rd party teams; Successfully completing the fusion of two companies building a performance-oriented team; enabled the revenue growth by streamlining the engineering process and allowed the ongoing country expansion.

Best achievements:

• Finalized two M&A operations
• First: Resolved the morale crisis in the acquired company and kept the team on its original formation, enabling a rational decision of which technology to keep from the M&A operation.
• Second: Onboarded a second M&A company with an already predefined merging plan, ensuring the teams have the psychological safety to stay in a company post-merge.
• Reverted two large customer resignment by handling the expectations and building an effective delivery strategy
• Enabled Finleap Connect new business use cases by structure the teams around the data streams
• Created a high-performance team cable of having a cross-team impact
• Set the engineering culture
• Expanded Finleap Connect OpenBanking to the EMEA region.
• Key role in mediating technical meetings between the Bharen Central Bank and Batelco on Open Banking APIs

Line of work:

• Merged the technology of the two companies, allowing for
• Deactivated unsuccessful projects on both ends
• Reduced 20 engineering positions from 3rd party
• Moved 10 engineers to companies from the same group
• Removed duplicated technology while maintaining the customer base of the two companies.
• Responsible for mid and long-term engineering strategy for the Open Banking technologies; the SaaS product finX API
• Coaching the engineering leadership
• Ensuring compliance, Security, and data privacy (attending GDPR, PDPL, and Bafin standards)
• Supporting the onboarding of large customers like Deutsche Bank, Sparkasse, Commerzbank, O2 Telefonica, and Samsung
• Facilitating technical rounds during fundraising and successfully undergoing due diligence scrutiny
• Developing high-revenue products
• Key role on M&A's by leading and assessing the technical due diligence processes
• Growing a diverse talent pool, as well as assuring the diversity can thrive by actively working with engineering managers to foster the inclusive culture
• Strategic and Tactical quarterly planning alongside the business stakeholders

As CTO and managing director, led the original team which built the product, being responsible for extending the product into other countries, engineering budget, and all the personnel working in Berlin (including people outside of IT).

Best achievement:

• Successful fundraising campaign, ensuring investors have the right understanding of the technical capabilities of the platform
• Launching the Ridelink in 3 countries (Germany, United Kingdom, and Spain)

Line of work:

• Responsible for the system architecture
• Built and maintained the server infrastructure
• Supported due diligences
• Hiring and team culture
• Built a cross-functional team of engineers (mobile, backend, and frontend) and UX designers

Technical project leader responsible for building the tech startups from the group up alongside the business manager and hiring the initial team that further took care of the newly created venture.

Important projects:

• Ridelink: See experience above.
• Ridesurf - Ridesharing: Worked on the MVP specification and development. In this project, the most challenging aspect was the real-time communication between two moving devices and the handling of scalable connections. In the back office, I specified and implemented the operational dashboard where the company agents could manage the demand according to the fleet and user demand.
• Tripda - Carpool: Together with the product owner and design team, lead the product specification, having a decisive impact on the platform's time to market. The most technical challenge was handling geofences when launching the platform in 16 countries.

Leading a team of 6 engineers and responsible for engineering the Official Brazilian government portal (Brazil.gov.br) and other federal portals such as Presidencia.gov.br, Secom.gov.br.

Developing an internal system to control the electronics workshop and fixing electronic equipment.