Growth Expert for Digital Products | Digital Identity| Artificial Intelligence

Key topic: Building a highly skilled and mission driven engineering team thatdelivers reliably and quicklyKey delivery (so far): Iteration 0 done in 4 weeks. We are live, but stealth. Team is delivering to production and learning the live behaviour of our product.Responsible for:- Bringing together technical and product vision to delivery, strategy and process- Continually shaping the technical stack and the processes behind to identify the "right one"- Hiring of engineers- Product- Leading development team (10 engineers and growing)

Helsing felt like sitting on top of a rocket when it takes off, it was great to be part of this take-off!Key topic: Building a highly skilled and mission driven engineering team thatdelivers reliably and quicklyResponsible for- Engineering recruiting activities and the process, hiring very talented people, small numbers, but high quality with external recruiters and active sourcers (2-4 FTE), not headhunters- Collaboration with top-notch AI Researcher- Build teams that can deliver production ready software, roles range from QA manager, product designer to various specializations of engineers- Pragmatic results in fast paced development process, delivery of first iteration of user experience in 2 months- Extending first iteration with internal tooling to gain efficiency and free-up time of engineers- Team building, development process, architecture development- Cloud infrastructure with MS Azure- Delivery of ML project for perception- Build automation, fast onboarding and setup of development environment, two weeks for new starter to be productiveNotable hands-on development- Initial requirements breakdown- Delivery of first iteration of user experience (Wireframes,React, JS) in 2 months- Extending first iteration with internal tooling (build,deployment) to gain efficiency and free-up time of engineers- Seamless hand over of hands-on work to new starters- Cloud infrastructure with MS Azure (procurement and setup,terraform)

Key topic: Heading newly formed Marketplace organizational unit, designing vision, mission and operational modelResponsible for- Leading engineering teams for Pricing, Matching, Dispatching, Payment and Invoicing- Initially three managers-of-managers reporting to me- Introduced mobile development to Marketplace to reduce dependencies on other parts of the organization, enabling faster development- Hiring during hyper growth periodFoster collaboration- Build team structures and culture across three locations- Introduce remote work and cross-location team collaboration- Improve bottom-up standardization process (Request for Comments) by adding clear accountabilities- Enabled cross-team collaboration on parts of the code that is owned by other departments (Rider app + Driver app + Marketplace)One-App Project- Integration of Marketplace technology of Kapten_ to FREE NOW- Integration of Marketplace engineering teams of Kapten_ (Paris) with HamburgHands-on development- Establish standard software (Infonova) with externals (Bearingpoint) for accounts payable and accounts receivable to mitigate audit risk of in-house software- Intensive agile process to deliver value in very short timeframe- Hands-on setup and operations of production environment (K8S, custom deploy tooling, AWS), after several tries to manage otherwise

An idea inspired by a board game (Ricochet Robots). Stephan Beier told me about it when I first met him in 2011.Unity and Firebase based puzzle game inspired by ricochet robots with some NP-hard (variant of travelling salesman) for Android and iOS. Actual development was 2 months FTE, if you cut out all the crazy meandering. Collaboration with Graphic Designer Viktor Schenk.

During this period we sold the company to Yoozoo and had major changes to how the company operates. This gave me the opportunity to grow as a manager and also way beyond the technical area.Responsible for- High 7-figure budget in CAPEX, OPEX and salaries- Reduced IT and staff costs in two years by 50%- EU and US Data Centers and CDNs- Migration of Bigpoint’s colocation data centers (L.A., Ashburn) to Yoozoo’s data center (L.A.)- All live games operations, ensure 24/7 uptime- Build and Deployment systems- Big Data system- Office IT for all locations (5 office at peak)- SAP, painfully outdated, overly customized system, developed multiple upgrade strategies, but none stuck- Platform Development (450m registrations) & Affiliate and Partner Integrations (350+)- Technical operation of Yoozoo and 3rd Party titles- Payment system (100+ providers)Responsible for parts of operations- Continuous downsizing by efficiency optimization, department re-organization and outsourcing parts of the operations- Leading company side of the reconciliation board, negotiation of IT agreement and remuneration policy with works council- Project execution of Berlin entity transfer into a new corporation- Establishment of processes and responsibilities to ensure compliance for GDPR- Responsibility for payment -team and -system and games technology team- Responsible for maintenance team, keep revenue of smaller long-tail products stable (~80K Euro revenue / month)Close collaboration with Chinese Owner (Yoozoo) & Learning Chinese (A1)- Accompany and contribute to merge process- Reporting line to HQ CTO including regular visits in ShanghaiLeverage innovation- Evaluation of on-premise Kubernetes cluster to lower public cloud costs, project successfully completed in 2020- Strategic planning to make costs scalable with the success of the games- Established experimental new game development process and small game team to develop HTML5 Facebook messenger game

Started as game developer on Game of Thrones in Berlin and then moved from the outside into my department. That enabled me to see very clearly where we had to improve.Hands-on backend development of Game of Thrones in C++- Metric system in Nebula via Influx and Grafana- Monitoring system via ZabbixRestarted BigData team and tech- Migration from self-hosted solution to Amazon Cloud- Reason for previous failure was unclear business responsibilities- Integrated team tightly with BI team to avoid responsibility diffusion- Managed backend support for Drakensang Online- Managed backend support for Mobile development- Technical expansion to Asia market, deep involvement in technical projects

Leading development, designing and coding, project management - Was a great time!Among many other tasks, here some key activities:- Development lead/CTO of a game development studio, Berlin - C#, Java, AngularJS Unity, MySQL, CouchDB, Spring/JavaEE- Design and development of a server software for a browser game, Munich - Java Standalone, Thrift, high throughput concurrent network I/O system, deterministic scalability, technical core component of the game- Design and development of a business software for POS promotion agency, Cologne - Spring/JavaEE, AngularJS, MySQL, ActiveMQ, Pentaho BI Suite- Technical project management of a messaging app for a telecommunication company, Duesseldorf - C, Objective-C, Java, JavaScript- Consulting for an e-commerce marketplace startup, Cologne - Challenge of unscalable platform to 100K CCU including video streaming and bi-directional video call-in system - PHP, Zend2, MySQL, RabbitMQ, varnishd, custom cache invalidation

Contract for work mainly games industry in Germany and also other industries.Services I provided:- Project management & Scrum- Technical leadership (incl. rent-a-CTO)- Technical due diligenceClients I worked for (among many many others)- EA – Outsourcing- Gameforge – Design and development of download client with C++/qt for all relevant game titles- Traviangames – Project management to establish IBM Tivoli, failed due to limited acceptance- Innogames - Evaluation of networking/multiplayer for a game, oversee evaluation of windows server

Key delivery: Re-launched legacy (visual basic based) anti-cheat software. Successful roll-out to 50K CCU thanks to proper load-testing ahead of the launch. C / anti-root-kit / proprietary crypto protocolKey process change: Establishment of transparent company backlog to manage priorities, weekly alignment with C-levelResponsibilities:- Product Owner, project management, technical lead and programming- Scrum training by Boris Gloger Consulting, 6+ month weekly training on ScrumMaster and Product Owner roles. Stop copying processes from a book and start adapting our own (The Ha in Shu Ha Ri).- Company Product Owner, including product development of new anti-cheat system, new, modern matchmaking feature to extend target group beyond hard-core gamers- Leading Product Owner team (3 POs) as the CPO- Establishment of new department by merging Platform and Web Development Team and Desktop - Development Team, additional responsibility for ESL desktop client / C++ / qt / XMPP / boost- Establish up to three development teams and team leads. Leading those leaders.

New organisational structure in business units, hand off community management and graphics design (events and branding), focus on Product and TechKey improvement: Establish Scrum "by the book" (Shu in Shu Ha Ri), acting Product Owner.

Key topic: Product development of new platform Consoles.net (defunc, re-integrated into ESL brand). Ported the ESL leagues system to consoles (xbox, playstation).Key technical Improvement: real time bi-directional communication with ejabberd (erlang/OTP) / XMPP via HTTP long-polling (I forgot the technical term) / SOA / RabbitMQ / symfony / experimenting with ScalaResponsible for:- Software development team- Community management team- Graphics and design team- Payment and booking system- Hiring- Development of web platform Electronic Sports League in Linux / PHP / JavaScript / PostgreSQL / XSLT / plus see Key technical improvement- Qualification of 6 apprentices (Fachinformatiker Anwendungsentwicklung)

Key Discovery: ESL Amateur Series, developed in two-person team, multi-layered league system that bridges public, open leagues to professional, closed e-sports leagues (ESL Pro Series). Premium subscription required, this increase pay users rate drastically and kicked off a significant increase of our B2C revenue streamResponsibilities:- Software development, community management, payment and booking system, hiring and training of apprentices- Project management, technical lead and programming- Integration of several other e-sports platforms- Development of web platform Electronic Sports League in Linux / PHP / JavaScript / PostgreSQL /XSLT

Product design and implementation of core e-sports features, like tournament management, match management, ranking system. Part of two-person team who established first monetization features via premium subscription (freemium) in 2002 on the ESL platformResponsibilities:- Implementation of payment system (20+)- Development of community web platform Electronic Sports League v2.0 in Linux / PHP / JavaScript / PostgreSQL / XSLT- Development of ranking- und matchmaking-logic

We were part of the Dotcom bubble, after the bust, we restarted as Turtle EntertainmentKey delivery: Came up with a design to abstract any form of league or tournament with one data structure and system that holds up till today (22 years later, 2022) and is still in use throughout the ESL product offerings, e.g. league integration into the xbox and ps networkResponsibilities:- Development and design of server software for booking game server in Linux / C / MySQL- Development of community web platform Electronic Sports League v1.0 in Linux / PHP / JavaScript / MySQL- Development of ranking- und matchmaking-logic