Aug 2025 – Present · 9 mos · San Francisco, California, United States · Remote

• TL for emerging agentic SaaS platform product (still in stealth) and AI upskilling of internal teams. (So far successful) experiment to see how far I can scale myself as IC with the power of AI.

Mar 2023 – May 2025 · 2 yrs 2 mos · Los Angeles, California, United States · Hybrid

• Built new software division within non-tech company from zero:
• Hired as EVP of Creator Tools to create "startup within startup" - Spotter was purely a financing/ad business
• Conceived and launched Spotter Labs and Studio as new product lines
• Wore multiple hats: head of product, engineering, and design while building the team from scratch
• Integrated LLMs, diffusion models, and custom ML into creator workflows for ideation, titles, and thumbnails
• Scaled organization to the point of hiring dedicated CTO and COO to take over operations

Apr 2022 – Mar 2023 · 11 mos · United States · Remote

• Ran Koji’s (now acquired by Linktree) marketing, business development, community, partnerships and DevRel. Later, helped Koji level up its apps and templates as PM.

Aug 2020 – Apr 2022 · 1 yr 8 mos

• Created, and led the Creator Relations team at Google, and started the "Google for Creators" outreach program. Built tools & infrastructure, created educational & inspirational content, and built community through social, forums, newsletters & events.

Oct 2016 – Jun 2021 · 4 yrs 8 mos

• Led the AMP Developer Relations & CMS/WordPress Relations teams at Google, where we helped publishers, creators and developers to create better, and more content on the web.
• Ran big flagship developer events (see AMP Conf, AMP Roadshow), built lots of tools for developers and content creators (see Web Stories for WordPress, AMP for WordPress), and created a plethora of documentation, tutorials, educational materials, blog posts and videos (see AMP YouTube channel, amp.dev, blog.amp.dev).

Jan 2014 – Oct 2016 · 2 yrs 9 mos

• As the DevRel lead & de-facto co-PM for Chrome DevTools, I've popularized the DevTools further and expanded its audience way beyond the 'hardcore developer'.
• Features I've envisioned and brought to life as part of my "DevTools for Designers" initiative, such as the Device Mode, Animation Panel and colorpicker, are now used by tens of millions of web developers & designers.

Feb 2012 – Jan 2014 · 1 yr 11 mos

• Post-acquisition of my startup Dextrose, I became the CTO for Zynga's R&D and future game development studio "Studio 5", bringing to life experimental and radically different games implemented in HTML5 (running natively in web browsers on all modern devices).
• Our game technology was used to bring games like Words With Friends to Facebook, we've worked on mobile web versions of CityVille and FarmVille, and we pioneered the idea of (and coined the term) Instant Games on the social messenger Kik (leading to unheard of viral distribution, before Apple shut down Kik's app-platform-like features). Fast forward now, "Instant games" are now a thing on FB Messenger, and mini-app ecosystems exist and strive around the world (see WeChat).

Sep 2010 – Feb 2012 · 1 yr 5 mos

• As Zynga Germany's CTO, I've transformed the vision of a full blown HTML5 Game Engine into reality.

Mar 2011 – Jan 2014 · 2 yrs 10 mos

• On a mission to making the web a better place for games, I've convinced Zynga, as first gaming company ever, to join the W3C. I spearheaded several efforts to make the web's APIs more inviting to game creators, including proposals for stuff like hit testing, but it was largely an uphill battle.

Jan 2010 – Sep 2010 · 8 mos · Mainz Area, Germany

• Dextrose was the incubator for my 'Aves' concept, later destined to become the first isometric game engine in JavaScript/HTML5, running entirely without plugins. As part of a 2-person team, I brought in the product vision and direction, and developed all engine and game prototypes from scratch. These prototypes generated so much attention that we were able to sell Dextrose to Zynga to scale up our operations internally within months.

Apr 2009 – Jan 2010 · 9 mos · Tokyo, Japan

• Changed social learning platform smart.fm to please a broader target audience with easily accessible JavaScript applications, a killer smart.fm framework, creating a truly unified experience. While smart.fm ceased to exist, the core framework is still being reused.

Dec 2007 – Mar 2009 · 1 yr 3 mos

• See 'jQuery UI Lead' job description. This was a full time sponsored position to work on jQuery UI.

Sep 2006 – Nov 2010 · 4 yrs 2 mos

• As creator of jQuery UI (currently in use by 36.16% of the top 10k websites, according to trends.builtwith.com), I helped millions of websites succeed building rich UI and interactions on the web, significantly accelerating the Web 2.0 era. I kicked off the project, contributed numerous core widgets (Draggable, Sortable, etc.), and led the engineering team over the course of 4 years.
• In addition, I've been a core team member and contributor to jQuery core, shaping the project, its conferences and outreach. The early dimensions plugin is now part of Core, and so are a couple of nifty APIs first introduced in jQuery UI.

Aug 2006 – Nov 2007 · 1 yr 3 mos · Mainz Area, Germany · On-site

• Initially a full stack engineer, I've worked on large-scale PHP codebases for our largest web clients, but soon specialized in frontend development, at a time when there was no such thing as "frontend engineer".
• As new frontend lead for NIDAG's biggest client, T-Online (parent of T-Mobile), I've worked on improving and innovating their rich clients for email, calendar and more (pre-Gmail, these were the most popular web email clients in Europe). Eventually, since T-Online had no appetite for disruptive innovation on their own, I devised a big product pitch, and prototyped a new Web 2.0 client for their email and calendar offerings from scratch within weeks, which then scored us a multi-year contract.

Jan 2000 – Jul 2006 · 6 yrs 6 mos · Freiburg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany · On-site

• In my early years as software engineer and entrepreneur, I've developed, launched and sometimes sold music players, mobile phone repair management software, a community site for anime fans, and many other projects that sometimes found success, but more importantly, taught me how to build and ship software.