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
- Schedule a Call
- tobi@unblocked.engineering
- unblocked.engineering
- Europe (Germany, Cyprus, Spain)
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
- GermanNative
- EnglishProfessional
- SpanishBasic
Diplomas
- iSAQB® Certified Professional for Software Architecture Foundation Level (2017)
Volunteering
- Co-Organizer of the SoCraTes Germany (Un)conference (2018 – Present)
- Rescue Swimmer / Paramedic at DLRG (2006 – 2013)
- Paramedic at ASB (2002 – 2007)
Interests
- Automation
- Cooking
- Cycling
- Diving
- Hiking
- OrgDev
- Psychology
- Reading
- SW Architecture
- SW Engineering
- Software Craft
- Traveling
- Water sports
- Writing