Founder & Technical Lead at PDFDancer (2025-01 – Present)
Founded and built a B2B SaaS platform for enterprise PDF transformation and document workflow automation, taking it from concept to validated product and initial commercial launch. Set product strategy, positioning, technical architecture, and implementation direction for a complex automation solution serving publisher and document-production workflows.
- Delivered proprietary PDF and machine-learning capabilities in production workflows, including layout-preserving transformations, font substitution workflows, document analysis, similar-font recommendations, and sensitive-data detection.
- Built an MCP-based integration for PDFDancer, exposing document transformation and workflow capabilities through tool-like interfaces for AI-assisted workflows.
- Designed and implemented backend services, document-processing pipelines, AI-assisted workflows, REST APIs, MCP integrations, and production infrastructure.
Managing Director / Technology Lead at Squad-C GmbH (2024-01 – 2025-12)
Led software delivery for German clients using distributed engineering teams across Europe and Asia. Aligned customer requirements, commercial priorities, and technical execution to improve delivery predictability and customer outcomes.
- Simplified an over-engineered Azure serverless architecture for a renewable energy SaaS platform by introducing a pragmatic container-based solution.
- Reduced infrastructure costs from approximately EUR 20,000 per month to EUR 2,000 per month while improving performance, maintainability, and operational reliability.
- Managed architecture and delivery trade-offs with a bias toward lean, maintainable systems that fit the business stage.
- Designed and implemented a Python-based AI-assisted engineering platform integrating GitHub workflows, automation pipelines, review loops, documentation generation, and human escalation.
- Coordinated distributed delivery across customer stakeholders and external development capacity.
Interim CTO at Solar-Planit Software GmbH (2022-01 – 2023-12)
Joined during a delayed product release with rising customer pressure, external partners waiting, and shrinking execution confidence.
- Moved release cadence from monthly to multiple releases per week by strengthening ownership, prioritization, release processes, and engineering practices.
- Restored focus by replacing loose planning with clear ownership, explicit priorities, and task-level follow-through.
- Personally implemented CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure automation, Docker-based deployments, Terraform provisioning, Ansible automation, monitoring, and production release improvements.
- Established production visibility and incident ownership so issues were caught, assigned, and solved before they reached customers.
- Rebuilt delivery reliability, operational stability, and engineering accountability during a critical product recovery period.
Consultant → Director Technology → CTO & Board Member at talentsconnect AG (2013-01 – 2021-12)
Moved from external technology consultant to executive leadership as Director Technology, CTO, and Board Member while the company scaled. Helped grow talentsconnect into a EUR 10M ARR HR tech SaaS business serving thousands of employer customers and hundreds of thousands of users.
- Owned product and technology roadmap execution end to end, translating company goals, customer needs, technical risk, and delivery capacity into executable engineering priorities.
- Built and led the technology organization across software engineering, product, QA, DevOps, IT, operations, and customer support.
- Recruited and developed 50+ engineers, engineering managers, and technical leaders while keeping architecture, delivery, and platform decisions tied to customer and business outcomes.
- Rebuilt delivery execution after the team had been working on roughly 50 features, tasks, and bugs in parallel, reducing work in progress and restoring focus on shippable increments.
- Led the evolution of the SaaS platform architecture, including backend services, API orchestration, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, DevOps practices, and production operations while balancing customer delivery with long-term platform evolution.
- Designed and evolved the API orchestration layer that decoupled third-party integrations from the core platform, reducing integration complexity while enabling faster customer onboarding.
- Built and evolved data pipelines supporting recommendation quality, customer analytics, reporting, and product intelligence through operational feedback loops.
- Implemented GDPR and ISO 27001 practices across product, engineering, infrastructure, and operations to strengthen enterprise readiness and customer trust.
- Set technology strategy with the executive team and board, linking roadmap priorities, architecture, delivery capacity, and investment decisions to business outcomes.
- Worked across product, sales, customer success, security, legal, and operations to resolve delivery trade-offs and keep enterprise commitments aligned with platform health.
Freelance Enterprise Architect (2008-01 – 2014-12)
Advised DAX-listed companies, public-sector organizations, and universities on enterprise architecture and integration.
- Designed large-scale enterprise software and integration architectures, translating business needs, stakeholder priorities, and operational risk into practical implementation plans.
- Worked in complex stakeholder environments where architecture, delivery, operations, and organizational constraints had to be aligned.
Team Lead / Project Manager (2006-01 – 2008-12)
Led teams of up to 8 engineers and managed technical delivery for B2B software projects.
- Coordinated project execution across engineering, stakeholders, and timelines, and handled risk, scope, and communication during implementation.
