Jan 2024 – Jan 2024 · 0 mo · Berlin, Germany · Hybrid

• "I highly recommend Raphael for his exceptional leadership and strategic vision to any company seeking an Interim or Fractional CTO."
• Davide Vitiello, CEO Spaceshelf
• Davide and Constantin are experienced entrepreneurs and leaders, having successfully founded and sold companies, and held key positions at SoundCloud, Delivery Hero, and Shopify.
• They have recently embarked on a new venture to revolutionize inventory management in the era of e-commerce. With the initial investment secured, time to market was crucial. It was my pleasure to assist these exceptional gentlemen by supporting the initial tech team (nearshored) and breaking down product ideas into manageable software components. We successfully used user story maps and created a realistic roadmap that was supported by OKRs. One key achievement was to hire a permanent CTO which we found in the amazing Claudemiro.

Sep 2023 – Jan 2024 · 4 mos · Berlin, Germany · Hybrid

• "You came in at the right moment when we needed your guidance and hands-on mentality to get the launch done. You did a phenomenal job! We will miss you too. All the best for your future projects. 💪 🚀"
• Marcus Tober, Mastermind, Founder and SVP of Semrush Enterprise,
• Semrush is a public American company with around 1400 employees that offers leading SaaS tools in the SEO space. Its traditional target group was small and medium-sized businesses. However, in 2022/2023, Semrush decided to expand its reach to large businesses and Multinational Corporations (MNCs). To facilitate this, a new department, "Semrush Enterprise," was founded.
• I undertook a thorough due diligence process of the existing status quo, which paved the way for a detailed plan to launch the product. This strategic approach was aimed at ensuring a seamless transition from the project's inception to its live phase. In addition to this, I was actively involved in expanding the department, contributing significantly to the hiring of engineers and structuring the team. A notable achievement was the recruitment of an extraordinary VP of Engineering. I organized all handovers, and the candidate successfully assumed their role in Q1/2004.

Oct 2022 – Jun 2023 · 8 mos · Berlin, Germany · Hybrid

• Productsup is a SaaS platform that empowers businesses to take complete control of their product data. It acts as a central hub, helping brands and retailers break down data silos and synchronize information across multiple channels. Productsup is used by the largest brands in the world, and chances are high that you've engaged with Productsup-generated content today without even noticing it.
• After a long tenure, the former VP of Engineering at Productsup embarked on new adventures. Faced with a choice, Productsup could either hire an external VP or coach and promote internal talent. They chose the latter. I assumed the role of interim VP of Engineering and supported Productsup and all its teams during this transition. This involved the full range of VP of Engineering duties, such as assisting in team reorganizations, discussing IT architecture decisions, giving feedback on projects and features, OKRs, and making hiring and performance decisions.
• The main goal was to coach an internal candidate to assume the role of VP of Engineering. This endeavor was successful, and the former Director of Engineering is now working effectively as the newly promoted VP of Engineering alongside the CTO.

Oct 2022 – Apr 2023 · 6 mos · Berlin, Germany · Hybrid

• Acrolinx offers a SaaS solution that not only ensures content is grammatically correct but also adheres to certain standards. Acrolinx enables the world's largest corporations to communicate with one voice. Particularly in this new age of AI-generated content, Acrolinx is more relevant than ever and is experiencing strong growth.
• I supported one of the most crucial teams within Acrolinx to handle this growth. This involved forming new teams, establishing new processes, and coaching leadership to take on new roles. As part of my assignment, I worked closely with one of the team leads who was successfully promoted to Director of Engineering for the new department we created.

Feb 2021 – Aug 2022 · 1 yr 6 mos

Sep 2020 – Feb 2021 · 5 mos · Berlin Metropolitan Area

May 2018 – Sep 2020 · 2 yrs 4 mos · Berlin Area, Germany

• Searchmetrics is a world leader in SEO software. Searchmetrics experienced massive growth and it was my pleasure to support the company in three key areas:
• Reorganization of the tech department towards product teams and establishing agile practices like Scrum, Post-Mortems, Api Driven Design and lean product development. This was done in close collaboration with the department leadership and the CEO.
• Architecture and design of a novel software system that allowed the analysis of SEO data in realtime. This feature was a competitive advantage no competitor was able to match.
• Redesign of the content product to support the dramatically grown user basis. The redesign massively increased the reliability of the platform. It was accomplished with zero downtime for customers.
• Key components of my assignments were released as “Suite 7” and successfully went live in 2020.

Jul 2016 – Mar 2018 · 1 yr 8 mos

• Zalando was named by The Economist “One of Europe’s most interesting technology companies”. In 2015 the company began a massive shift in management - from command and control to radical agility. That shift towards agility is underlined by a move in technology from monoliths to microservices. I was part of business critical IT projects that ensured that this shift is successful.

Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 · 1 yr

• Springer is a worldwide leader in scientific publishing and e-learning. Dr. Bauer was part of the international management and architecture team that successfully designed and rebuilt Springer’s digital content delivery and e-learning systems (LRS, LMS) from the ground. The new platform based on microservices and agile management techniques dramatically reduced time to market for new features. At the same time it vastly improved productivity and happiness of both business and engineering teams.
• Technologies: Play 2 Framework, sbt, Scala, Java, Akka, Solr, Lucene, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, SOA, microservices, Chef (Iaas), Cloudfoundry (Paas), Testing strategies, Metrics, Graphite, Graphana, Kibana, Logstash, Docker, Coremedia CMS, X-Api (TinCan), continuous integration and delivery, Scrum, Agile.

Jan 2013 – Jan 2013 · 0 mo · Berlin

• Zanox is the Europe's leading and largest affiliate marketing platform.
• Unfortunately I am not allowed to disclose in detail what I do at zanox. But it is safe to say that I deal with the whole enterprise stack. From Angular.js to Java Enterprise (EE6 and JBoss 6.1 EAP) to queuing systems to offline and realtime data processing systems (Hadoop, Kafka, Impala).
• Zanox is large - both in terms of data it has to process and analyze as well as in terms of customer traffic. This makes zanox a unique and thrilling company to work for.

Jan 2012 – Jan 2012 · 0 mo

• Design and implementation of a large scale web application and integration with already existing web services (SOA). J2EE Ninja Framework as backend, Google Web Toolkit (GWT) as frontend, MongoDB as database. Ninja Framework, J2EE, MongoDB, Jetty, Nginx, webservices, SOA, OAuth, Rest Json Api, Maven, Test driven development, SCRUM, DVCS develop and release setup (using git), gwtp, gin, gwt-query, Google ajax search implementation.

Aug 2011 – Jan 2016 · 4 yrs 5 mos · Berlin, Germany

Jan 2011 – Jan 2012 · 1 yr

• Design and architecture of a large scale web application completed by a mobile offline frontend. Apps compatible with Apple App Store and Android Market.
• Play Framework as backend, Google Web Toolkit (GWT) as frontend, deployed on Google App Engine cloud.
• Phonegap, Apple App Store, Android market, cross platform development, mobile development, OpenStreetMap,
• Rest Json Api, Maven, Test driven development, SCRUM, DVCS develop and release setup (using mercurial),
• gwtp, gin, gwt-query, Google ajax search implementation.

Jan 2011 – Jan 2012 · 1 yr

• Design and architecture of a large scale web application. Play Framework as backend,
• Google Web Toolkit (GWT) as frontend, deployed on Google App Engine cloud.
• Rest Json Api, Maven, Test driven development, SCRUM, DVCS develop and release setup (using mercurial),
• gwtp, gin, gwt-query, Google ajax search implementation.

Jan 2010 – Jan 2016 · 6 yrs

Jan 2010 – Jan 2011 · 1 yr · Berlin, Germany

• Responsible for establishing GWT in the company as external staff. Teaching teams, setting up technical environment. Successful launch of established technology in October 2011.

Jul 2009 – Oct 2010 · 1 yr 3 mos

Jan 2008 – Present · 18 yrs 3 mos · Berlin Metropolitan Area

• It is my ultimate ambition to enable rapid software delivery for sustainable business success. With more than 20 years of experience in the industry, I can support you in a range of key areas: from Fractional & Interim CTO management to Software Engineering and Private Equity/Venture Capital Tech Strategy & Due Diligence.
• I enjoy leading and excel when it comes to challenging assignments: changing organizations from waterfall to a lean and agile culture, building up in-house IT capabilities from scratch, and turnaround management for projects in crisis mode. My goal is to foster a fearless culture that leads to highly motivated teams and great business results.
• My clients include international companies like Semrush Inc, Zalando SE, Mister Spex SE, Springer, Zanox, Searchmetrics, Macmillan, Nature and Holtzbrinck Verlagsgruppe - spanning industries as diverse as publishing, e-commerce and advertising.
• The truth is that I am deeply passionate about people and technology. I lead open source projects like Ninja (1800 Github stars), and wrote the books “Spicy: The Tech Leadership Cookbook” and “Effective Scrum”. I am also a certified AWS Certified Solutions Architect.

Jan 2007 – Jan 2009 · 2 yrs

Jan 2005 – Jan 2006 · 1 yr

• Development of a software package that checks if annotations between different genome versions are valid.

Jan 2004 – Jan 2005 · 1 yr

• Development of a Text Mining IDE for TEMIS products. Based on Eclipse RCP (Richt Client Platform). Special emphasis on usage of Cruisecontrol as automatic build tool and automated tests.

Jan 2003 – Jan 2004 · 1 yr

• Development and teaching of a robotics course (Lego Mindstorms) for the education of highly talented children.

Jan 2003 – Jan 2004 · 1 yr

• Integration of different data sources (swissprot, gene ontology) into a protein information warehouse (www.columba-db.de) [Python, BioSQL]

Jan 2002 – Jan 2003 · 1 yr