Work

Co-founded Upgrid as CTO in January 2025. Swiss energy reform opened a window for Lokale Energiegemeinschaften; the job was never “build an app.” It was build the platform where grid metering data becomes allocation, invoices carry Swiss QR-bill references, and a wrong VAT line is an accounting problem — the same financial correctness bar I held at N26, in a different domain.

Built the technical foundation from scratch: SDAT ingestion, fifteen-minute consumption allocation, billing engine, QR-bill PDF generation, Bexio sync, and operator workflows for community formation and exception handling. The platform serves consumers, full operator accounts, co-brand partners (municipalities and installers who bring members while Upgrid operates the communities), and affiliates — each with different permissions on the same monorepo. Product scale today: 2k+ members, 250+ communities, 150+ municipalities.

Deliberate architecture for a small team: 37-package monorepo with shared Postgres schema and RLS multi-tenancy — the opposite call from N26’s ~200-service estate, driven by team size and real coupling. Invested in engineering multipliers rather than raw feature count: infrastructure as code for Better Stack monitors and PostHog feature flags, CI ratchets on layered data access, metrics-as-code, a company brain agent so ops answers questions without interrupting engineering, and guardrails that make AI-assisted delivery safe to merge. Shipped bill-upload LLM pre-fill in consumer onboarding.

Also own product and go-to-market when the bottleneck is clarity: savings calculator, LEG explainer content, co-brand and affiliate landing pages, multi-channel acquisition, and signup instrumentation in PostHog — built like production software, not bolted on after launch.

Platform engineering at one of Europe’s leading HR tech companies during a critical growth phase. Defined technical direction for core platform services, shaped engineering standards, and operated as a cross-team technical authority at scale.

Four years shaping the technical core of Europe’s most-funded neobank. As Principal Engineer: delivered the architectural vision for payments (bank and peer-to-peer transfers) and customer acquisition; led the overhaul of financial crime prevention — replaced a static rule engine spread across microservices with a real-time Apache Flink streaming system in under six months. Before that, as Tech Lead: architected the fee charging platform that became standard infrastructure embedded in N26’s ledger APIs across Europe.

Returned to GFT after IBM as Software Architect and Tech Lead. Delivered production banking platforms for financial institutions across Europe — core banking systems, compliance infrastructure, digital banking portals. Worked directly with client engineering leadership on architecture, led cross-functional teams, and built internal tooling used by other delivery teams across the practice.

Led a team in IBM’s innovation lab building an internal product to detect and prevent leakage of confidential information across the company. Took prototypes through design, delivery, and production — the first stretch where the job was owning a product end-to-end inside a large organization, not shipping features against someone else’s architecture.

First professional chapter in banking delivery. Built rich internet applications for international banking clients, then moved into mobile — internal SDKs and frameworks, and a small team shipping an internal app store. The foundation for a decade of regulated software work that continued through IBM and a later return to GFT as architect and tech lead.