Work

This is my career path. It's probably a little too detailed but I didn't have time to write a short CV so I wrote a long one. I'd like to move away from the career networks which are still much too relevant and this is a first iteration.

Zalando

February 2021 - now

As the Director of Platform Infrastructure which includes the Develper Productivity department I led before, my mission is to evolve and consolidate our service offering towards more than 250 internal builder teams, improving every aspect of software delivery performance for Zalando.

March 2020 - January 2021

Finally able to focus and double down on Develper Productivity as Head of that department after designing organizational principles together with my leadership peers, and having rolled out a new org structure based on those principles.

September 2019 - February 2020

Expanded responsibilities from Monitoring & Observability to temporarily include Develper Productivity, helping my teams help all other teams bring ideas to production easier and faster.

April 2017 - August 2019

Moved to Berlin and back into management to take the position of Head of Engineering with dedicated ownership for Monitoring & Observability. I help my teams help all other teams operate their services and notice when things go wrong.

January 2016 - March 2017

Senior Principal Engineer for Smart Inventories taking care of inventory valuation in a lovely team which was led by a former direct of mine. Hi Aike :) A lot of database archeology and analysis but you can't create new value if you don't preserve what's already valuable. It was a great learning experience going back to an individual contributor role to experience the changes in leadership and organization you had introduced as a manager..

July 2015 - December 2015

Took a six month sabbatical to chill and build Unknown Artist Studio in Recklinghausen, which was really a childhood dream. I transplanted the hobby recording studio to Berlin when I moved here in 2017.

January 2013 - June 2015

Head of Engineering for Payment & Tooling and Site Lead at the newly established Dortmund office growing from 9 to roughly 65 employees. The office has grown healthily to around 100 employees since then without my direct influence. I'm proud.

July 2012 - December 2012

Site Lead & Team Lead bootstrapping the first Zalando Tech hub outside Berlin as the cultural nucleus and go-to-person for everything starting out with various Tooling projects and then staffing the team for the first Zalando Payment Provider.

April 2010 - June 2012

Started as Team Lead for Back Office Tooling still contributing code as I initially wanted to join as a Software Developer. The CTO convinced me that I'd do fine as a lead instead. Additionally served as the lead for the Shop team later on before deciding to move to Dortmund in 2012 to be closer to my family which finally led to my brother and I playing in a band again.

Genloop

March 2009 - February 2010

Software Developer (remote) building a TV dashboard for sports betting based on Swing and Java 2D. That was fun! I love working on user interfaces and enjoy visual design aspects of user experience.

November 2007 - February 2009

Software Developer & consultant at Jamba!, later Fox Mobile Distribution in Berlin for Java and web architecture: building and piloting their configurable frontend component framework for partner shops.

October 2001 - November 2007

Software Developer part time and gradually moving to full time during my Computer Science studies, building a rapid prototyping framework generating JSF frontend + JPA backend from annotated entity relationship models.