Eric Heymann

In short: twelve years as CTO, VP Engineering and SVP Technology at Axel Springer, FlixBus, HRS and smava, the largest organisation with more than 200 people. Since 2020 at AWS, advising C-level across EMEA on GenAI in engineering.

I want the people in digital product engineering organisations to create more value for their customers with less effort, year after year, and to find better ways of doing it on their own initiative. My work has been about the conditions for that: teams that own their decisions, and an architecture that lets them move without waiting for each other. Since 2020 at AWS, I have helped enterprises apply the same approach to generative AI in engineering.

Within Axel Springer I was CTO at BILD Digital, gamigo and idealo, where the organisation more than doubled in two years and I built its leadership layer. At FlixBus, as VP Engineering reporting to a co-founder, I designed the operating model for an engineering organisation that grew to well over 150 engineers in Munich, Berlin and Kharkiv: independent teams within clear guardrails, each set up to run like a small business unit. At HRS I took over, as interim CTO, an engineering organisation that was already in crisis.

At smava I was interim SVP Technology in a regulated fintech. Budget responsibility came with every one of these roles, and at HRS and smava so did security, compliance and incident management.

At AWS I have advised the C-level of enterprises across EMEA, as practice manager for DACH and UKI and as principal advisor, including in regulated financial services. I led the adoption of AI in software development at enterprise engineering organisations, and I wrote the GenAI operating and governance models that answer who may run what against which data and who is accountable when an agent gets it wrong.

Machine learning came first: a diploma thesis on classifying objects in 3D scenes at TU Berlin, then ten years of search technology at Fireball, Lycos, Seekport and Ask.com. Today I build with coding agents every day, including the systems I run my own work on.

Sr. Manager Cloud Transformation Advisory and Principal Consultant at Amazon Web Services (AWS), Professional Services (2020-11 – Present)

• Practice manager for DACH and UKI, building the advisory practice and leading distributed senior teams; principal advisor to customer C-level in more than 20 engagements, from mid-sized companies to large enterprises, including regulated financial services
• Led AI-in-SDLC adoption for enterprise engineering organisations, tied to business outcomes: company-wide rollout of Claude Enterprise and Claude Code decided at one customer (over 3,000 engineers), starting with pilot teams; spec-driven development with Kiro at another
• Led transformation programmes and Cloud Centers of Excellence across EMEA, with the C-level of the customer in the room

SVP Technology (interim), reporting to the co-founder and CEO at smava GmbH (2019-09 – 2020-09)

• Owned incident management and major escalations, and carried security and compliance in a regulated fintech environment
• Steered the recovery from an outage of the business-critical BI system, which marketing spend depended on, with a dedicated engineering team: root cause fixed, normal operation restored, correction-of-errors measures implemented
• Led 100 engineers and coached C-level on technology-business alignment, delivery improvement, and people development
• Owned cloud strategy and architecture, the data mesh, office IT, innovation, and the IT budget (low double-digit EUR millions) that paid for all of it, lifting BI/DWH reporting reliability from 60% to 99%

VP Engineering, reporting to a co-founder at FlixMobility GmbH (FlixBus) (2016-08 – 2019-07)

• Set up each team to run like a small business unit, accountable for its costs and the outcome KPIs it directly influences, with the aim that each team pays for itself
• Owned the transformation, the operating model and the organisation design that let the engineering department run at speed with independent teams, aligned through guardrails and a defined review threshold: 30 teams, 180 engineers, in Munich, Berlin and Kharkiv, and the IT budget behind it
• Broke the monolith into micro-services and self-contained systems. Containerised, taking deploy frequency from once every three days to several times daily
• Owned the migration of production workloads to AWS, and set the requirements for the target platform as its largest internal customer; the platform build itself and the consolidation of three data centres sat with the Director Platform and IT Operations
• Owned the technical integration of five acquired platforms into the engineering organisation, without deal or legal integration responsibility

Interim CTO and Transformation Coach at Self-employed (La Prairie Group, LocaFox, HRS) (2015-05 – 2016-07)

• HRS, reporting to the owner: took over an engineering organisation of 240 engineers in three locations that was already in crisis, and restructured it toward product teams
• Managed the IT budget (double-digit EUR millions), security, compliance, incident management and office IT
• Led the migration of 69 applications to the cloud through its decisive phase, driven by the planned data-centre exit; replaced the delivery provider mid-programme, established the Cloud Competence Center and built up the Innovation Lab in Berlin

Chief Technology Officer, three consecutive roles within the group at Axel Springer AG (idealo, gamigo, BILD.de) (2008-07 – 2015-04)

• idealo (2012-2015): Reporting to the founder-led management. Grew the organisation from 70 to 150 people and from 3 to 16 leads in two years, across development, operations, release management, QA, IT security, and agile, and owned the budget for all of it. Introduced agile delivery across 18 teams and put an on-call regime in place, at one of Germany's largest price-comparison platforms.
• gamigo (2010-2012): Modernised infrastructure and organisation for a successful divestiture. Rebuilt the e-commerce backend and supported the buyer's technical due diligence.
• BILD Digital (2008-2010): Member of the management team, running technology for the BILD brand's digital activities (BILD.de, BILD mobile, BILD Net-TV). Delivered a roughly EUR 20M fixed-price CMS replacement within budget.

Director Global Content Acquisition at IAC / Ask.com (1998 – 2008)

• Built up and led the German R&D centre.

Technical Director Search Europe at Lycos Europe / Bertelsmann (1998 – 2008)

• Co-founded Fireball, Paperball and Firemail.

Diplom-Informatiker (Computer Science Diploma, with honours) – Technische Universität Berlin, 1991–1997