I’m Tobi, and I love making software development better and more enjoyable. With over 20 years in the field, I’ve worked in various roles like software engineer, architect, tech lead, founder, and coach.
I focus on improving productivity, quality, and teamwork to make customers and employees happier. My passion lies in bringing out the best in teams through culture, code, and collaboration.
My broad and deep expertise, from bootstrapped startups to large corporations, and the ability to understand complex sociotechnical systems quickly ensures thought-through, relevant, and actionable input on your challenges.

Track record

I started developing websites and web applications for clients and my own projects, when I was 12 years old. Discovering the growing complexity of larger projects, I studied computer science with a focus on software systems engineering to learn how to develop simple and clean solutions for complex problems. Meanwhile, I trained and coached other students in programming languages, software design and distributed systems. After university, I joined Dräger in Germany as a full-time software engineer. Here I worked on the Regard 7000 Gas Detection system and contributed to its successful market launch. At Dräger, I also started coaching and training engineers on Git, CI/CD, software design, architecture and software craft thinking. I lead improvement initiatives around automated and unit testing, supporting teams in developing maintainable software.
Afterward, I joined PAYONE as a senior software engineer and software architect, co-creating their first remote software team. With this team, we implemented payment connectors and fraud prevention services. Here I was also leading a refactoring from a monolithic Java/PHP application to smaller services, and I led the team in doubling our deployment frequency. This helped us to act more timely to customer feedback, leading to a leaner approach to software product development.
I joined BRYTER in 2020 as a senior software engineer, taking over technical- and product-leadership responsibilities. With my first team, we built a prototype for one of the platform’s key components within a week. After validating our hypothesis, we implemented the solution that has been part of the platform up to this date. At BRYTER, I co-created the tech leadership community and founded a platform team for developer experience. With the DevEx team, we dramatically improved the speed and excellence with which other teams in the company operated by reducing pipeline lead times by 70% and introducing full continuous deployments for 15 teams (roughly 60 people). Apart from this, we introduced a shared knowledge base for engineers and several other improvements to culture, tools and processes.
Since 2023, I have been working fully self-employed as an engineering advisor, technical coach, and interims engineering lead (up to CTO level) with software startups and other companies, helping them to build the right software faster through collaboration, coaching and mentoring for their teams and leadership.

Why Invisory?

I love to help interesting companies solve challenging engineering and culture problems. Invisory allows me to connect with those companies and like-minded experts. I believe that great networks and communities help us grow further in our profession and learn and grow by helping others. With Invisory, I have found a network that allows me to find all of this: people to learn and grow with, interesting projects and clients, and support whenever I need it.