Team building & advisory
Delivery is a people business: the person who owns the outcome should design the team. I have also done independent work since 2016.
Two teams from scratch
Twice in two years I have been handed the same situation: a customer commitment forming in pre-sales, requirements still ambiguous, and no team. For both the GPU-evaluation engagement and the GenAI platform delivery, I owned the full staffing arc:
- Role design - drafting role specs and technical interview loops for perception, ML, and platform engineering profiles before the scope was fully settled
- Screening - 30+ candidates per cycle, with solo technical interviews on the finalists
- Composition - mixing external hires with internal transfers into 6-7 person cross-disciplinary teams (architects, developers, DevOps, test, business analysis, PM)
- Onboarding and delivery - taking the team I hired through execution to a shipped result, not handing it off
Both teams shipped: a 76-page hardware verdict and a v1.0.0 production platform.
Other work
Three chapters:
Front-end contracting (2016-2019) - multi-year contract work with a small Berlin consulting firm: ecommerce sites, landing pages, and interaction-heavy front-ends delivered end to end - HTML/CSS/JS, Bootstrap, Vue.js, WordPress, Shopify.
Founding-team engineer, smart-home OS startup (2020) - joined an early-stage smart-home OS startup as a founding-team engineer: integrated heterogeneous sensors and peripherals into the central product hub, owned the safety/security subsystem - and contributed beyond engineering, helping prepare investor pitches and product-narrative materials during early fundraising cycles.
Advisory work (2019-present) - engagements across three domains: process automation for SMBs, purchasing and logistics for an investment fund, and operational support for non-profits. Engagements range from a few advisory hours a month to full-month bursts, across paid and pro bono work.