Tobi(as Mende)

Profile

I am a hands-on (technical) advisor helping software companies build better software faster. I collaborate with teams and leaders on technical, cultural, and systemic challenges. By leveraging the engineering experience and competencies, I have helped many companies in the past to achieve higher productivity and professionalism, better quality, increased employee satisfaction, and customer happiness. Furthermore, I support clients as a software architect and engineer.

Experience

Tech Unicorn Builders, Self-employed

Remote

Co-Founder, CTO, & Consultant

May 2024 - Present

  • Being part of a CTO/CPO tandem
  • Hands-on consulting for startups in their growth challenges
  • Build solutions for startup founders most common needs
  • Changing the startup ecosystem toward more empathy and humaneness
  • Running assessments with startups and acting on the findings
  • Helping startups to build the right products faster and with better quality
  • Human-centric (Technical) Leadership
  • Product Development
  • Organizational Development
  • Startups
  • Systems Thinking
  • DevEx Consulting
  • DevOps Consulting
  • Leadership Coaching
  • Software Architecture
  • Technical Advisory

unblocked.engineering, Self-employed

Remote

Founder, Technical Advisor, CTO

Jun 2022 - Present

  • Helping software companies build better software faster
  • Identifying and removing productivity bottlenecks
  • Increasing engineering effectiveness
  • Interims/fractional CTO for startups
  • Team coaching and leadership coaching
  • Hiring and building high-performing engineering teams
  • DevEx Consulting
  • DevOps Consulting
  • Leadership Coaching
  • Organizational Development
  • Software Architecture
  • Software Engineering
  • Technical Advisory
  • Technical Agile Coaching
  • Technical Leadership

Seed-stage Startup, Contract

Remote

Interim/Fractional Senior Product Manager

Apr 2024 – Present

  • Introducing product discovery processes for better communication enabling teams to work on the right increments
  • Running product strategy workshops
  • Developing structures and processes for better product operations
  • Product management for a mobile app
  • Product Management
  • Product Strategy
  • Product Operations
  • Organizational Development

Technical Agile Coach and Advisor

Apr 2024 – Present

  • Coaching the dev team toward a continuous improvement mindset
  • Introducing and facilitating retrospectives
  • Introducing infrastructure as code
  • Automating and accelerating deploy processes
  • Continuous Improvement
  • Infrastructure as Code
  • Technical Agile Coaching
  • Technical Leadership
  • DevEx Consulting
  • Pulumi
  • TypeScript
  • GitHub Actions
  • AWS
  • PostgreSQL

Undisclosed Startup, Contract

Remote

Technical Advisor and Technical Agile Coach

Jan 2024 – Jun 2024

  • Building and upskilling the team
  • Reducing technical complexity
  • Preparing and facilitating team programmings
  • Swift
  • iOS
  • OpenAPI
  • REST
  • CircleCI
  • GCP

Fractional CTO, Technical Advisor

Oct 2023 - Dec 2023

  • Building and upskilling the founding team
  • Reducing technical complexity
  • Accelerating software development processes, improving quality
  • Preparing the team and the software for the product launch.
  • CircleCI
  • Docker
  • Elastic Search
  • GCP
  • Go
  • Helm
  • Istio
  • JavaScript
  • Kubernetes
  • MongoDB
  • NATS
  • OpenAPI
  • REST
  • Swift
  • Terraform
  • gRPC
  • iOS

BRYTER GmbH, Contract

Remote

Tech- & Product Lead, Sr. Software Engineer

Jun 2020 - Jan 2023

  • Founding and leading a cross-functional platform team for developer experience
  • Introducing continuous deployments for 15 teams and 60 people
  • Reducing pipeline lead time by over 70%
  • Driving cultural and technical changes towards engineering excellence
  • Coaching and training engineering teams in tooling and methodologies
  • Co-founding and leading the technical leadership community
  • Driving technical vision and strategy and defining architecture guidelines
  • AWS
  • DataDog
  • Docker
  • GitLab
  • Kotlin
  • Keycloak
  • Kubernetes
  • N8N
  • Playwright
  • Pulumi
  • Ansible
  • Python
  • Selenium
  • Spring Boot
  • Terraform
  • TypeScript
  • Vite
  • VueJS
  • PostgreSQL

Weels, Self-employed

Remote

Co-Founder, Architect, Full-Stack Engineer

Jun 2021 - Feb 2023

  • Building a high-performing video widget for websites
  • Implementing the application (frontend, backend, infrastructure)
  • AWS
  • Docker
  • GitLab
  • NodeJS
  • Tailwind
  • Terraform
  • TypeScript
  • VueJS
  • Web Components

PAYONE GmbH

Remote

Sr. Software Engineer, Architect, Tech Lead

Jul 2018 - May 2020

  • Co-building and co-leading the first remote team
  • Developing and operating payment connectors and fraud prevention systems
  • Refactoring of monolithic applications to self-contained services
  • Reducing deployment lead times by >50% and simplifying processes
  • ActiveMQ
  • Ansible
  • Apache
  • Bitbucket
  • Camel
  • Confluence
  • Docker
  • Elastic Search
  • Git
  • Groovy
  • Infinispan
  • IntelliJ
  • Java
  • Jenkins
  • Jira
  • Kanban
  • Karaf
  • Kibana
  • MySQL
  • OSGi
  • Puppet
  • Spring (Boot)
  • Swagger
  • TDD
  • Tomcat

Dräger Safety GmbH & Co. KGaA

Lübeck, Germany

Software Engineer, Tech Lead, Architect

Sep 2015 - Jun 2018

  • Application development for distributed gas detection systems
  • Teaching Git, Git Workflows and TDD
  • Consulting teams on CI/CD pipelines and software design
  • Driving software craft awareness across the engineering department
  • Azure Edge
  • Ansible
  • Bitbucket
  • C++ (98/11/17)
  • Confluence
  • Docker
  • Git
  • Groovy
  • IntelliJ
  • Java
  • Jenkins
  • Jira
  • Kanban
  • Mercurial
  • Python
  • Qt
  • QtCreator
  • Scrum
  • TDD / BDD
  • VSCode

TOBSOLUTION, Self-employed

Lübeck, Germany

Web Developer, IT Consultant

Mar 2004 - Aug 2015

  • Developing custom web pages and web applications for small and medium businesses
  • Providing IT support and consulting as well as web hosting
  • Consulting non-technical clients and understanding their needs
  • Apache
  • CSS
  • HTML5
  • JavaScript
  • Linux
  • Nginx
  • PHP
  • Ruby on Rails
  • Wordpress

University of Lübeck

Lübeck, Germany

Student Research Assistant

Sep 2013 - Jul 2015

  • Institute of Telematics
  • I/O-programming in Ruby an Java for research projects
  • Administration of teaching groups for C++ and Java programming
  • Git
  • IntelliJ
  • Java
  • Jenkins
  • Netty
  • Ruby
  • XMPP

Student Research Assistant

Jan 2014 - Aug 2014

  • Institute of Technical Computer Science
  • Development of algorithms for the position control of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) in C++ using the Robot Operating System (ROS)
  • Setup of a coherent system for technical documentation, version control and continuous integration for AUV projects
  • C++
  • Eclipse
  • Git
  • Jenkins
  • ROS

Student Research Assistant

Oct 2011 - Jul 2013

  • Institute for Software Engineering and Programming Languages
  • Exercise instructor for the module Software Engineering
  • Advisor for the software engineering practicum
  • Git
  • Java
  • Jenkins
  • SonarCube
  • TDD

Student Research Assistant

Sep 2011 - Mar 2012

  • Institute of Telematics
  • Design and development of distributed algorithms for autonomous vehicles
  • Android
  • Git
  • IntelliJ
  • JNI
  • Java

Education

Master of Science in Computer Science (1.3)

University of Lübeck

Nov 2012 - Aug 2015

Specialization in Software Systems Engineering, Smart Embedded Systems and Real-time verification

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science (1.8)

University of Lübeck

Oct 2009 - Nov 2012

Specialization in Media Informatics, Human Machine Interaction and Machine Learning
photo of me

Skills

    • Programming
    • Bash
    • CSS
    • Go
    • HTML
    • Java
    • JavaScript
    • Kotlin
    • Python
    • Swift
    • TypeScript
      Frameworks
    • Express
    • NodeJS
    • React
    • Spring (Boot)
    • Vue
      Infrastructure
    • AWS
    • Cloud Functions
    • DynamoDB
    • Elastic Search
    • GCP
    • gRPC
    • Istio
    • Karaf
    • Keycloak
    • Kibana
    • Kubernetes
    • Lambda
    • Linux
    • MongoDB
    • MySQL
    • N8N
    • OpenFaaS
    • PostgreSQL
    • REST
    • Tomcat
      Developer Tools
    • Ansible
    • CircleCI
    • DataDog
    • Docker
    • Git
    • GitHub
    • GitLab
    • Gradle
    • Grafana
    • Helm
    • IntelliJ
    • Jenkins
    • Jest
    • Maven
    • Mercurial
    • Playwright
    • Pulumi
    • Selenium
    • Terraform
    • TurboRepo
    • Yarn
      Methodologies
    • Agile
    • BDD
    • DevOps
    • DDD
    • Kanban
    • Lean
    • Scrum
    • Software Teaming
    • TDD
      Misc
    • Confluence
    • Jira
    • N8N
    • Notion
    • ... ask me ;-) ...

Languages

  • German
    Native
  • English
    Professional
  • Spanish
    Basic

Diplomas

  • iSAQB® Certified Professional for Software Architecture Foundation Level (2017)

Volunteering

Interests

  • Automation
  • Cooking
  • Cycling
  • Diving
  • Hiking
  • OrgDev
  • Psychology
  • Reading
  • SW Architecture
  • SW Engineering
  • Software Craft
  • Traveling
  • Water sports
  • Writing