Sebastian ​Thees
IT Consulting


I empower IT to boost added value by upgrading Software Engineering with Organizational Development.

Goal oriented.
Trusted.
No Bullshit.

Organizational Development

Management consulting based on systems theory

I enable people and organizations to achieve effective leadership, sustainable change and future-oriented organizational development.

Increasing value creation and improving working conditions while maintaining a high level of flexibility are particularly important to me.

Software Engineering

Agile Fullstack Development

As an agile developer with over 15 years of experience, I support software teams to solve problems together and deliver customer benefits quickly and iteratively.

My tech stack is extremely broad and deepens into backend, infrastructure and cloud.

Software Architecture Design

Classic / microservices / serverless - Architectures

When it comes to realizing the product vision, the right trade-off between scalability and maintainability is crucial.

I support you in designing the right software architecture - from enterprise to serverless with relevant experience.

Cloud Engineering

Cloud services, cloud software architectures and migrations into the cloud

Expertise in cloud platforms, particularly Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure.

"Automate everything with code only" is my principle - infrastructure, delivery pipelines, testing, monitoring & alarming.

The combination of Software Engineering and Management Consulting
can elevate the level of proficiency for teams and organizations.

Book a call to benefit from this!

sebastian thees avatar

Leader – Software Engineer – Organizational Designer.

Committed to lean agile organizations & future leadership principles. Highly empathic team player.

15+ years of experience working for large enterprise companies as well as small startups along various industries.

I am an ambitious fast learner with passion to solve problems and to communicate - always keen to work with other experts in an effective organization to build the next digital revolution.

Software Engineering...

I have been working in every aspect of software engineering, including frontend and backend areas as well as a strong operational responsibility in ranging from onpremise hosting over to cloud engineering in high load production environments.

In the past I led software teams for better software architecture, automated deployment pipelines, testing strategies and monitoring resulting in higher overall quality features and faster time to fix.

Being part of a software team makes a versatile and highly value team member already.


...Organizational comprehension

However, through my entire career I always felt a lack of "management understanding" and mismatch of company processes with real world customer problems.
Decisions were defined top down bypassing experts. Common agreements were not kept. Employees were not given the "right" power to decide or were not trusted. The work-hindering set of company rules increased over time - with the goal to provide "control" for uncontrollable situations.

Therefore I began studying management theories and espacially the systems therory by Niklas Luhman.
That was a game changer for me which made every experienced behavior in the past explainable to me! The followed 6 month apprenticeship to a "future leadership organizational developer" fostered me to advise companies that face the same problems I saw in companies during my career.

Trainings & Certifications

  • future leadership logo
  • itil v3 foundaction logo
  • lku kanban logo
  • professional scrum master logo
  • professional product owner logo
  • certified professional for software architecture logo
  • international requirements engineering logo
  • sun certified java programmer 6 logo
  • prince 2 foundaction logo

Jobs & Education

03.2022 - today
sebastian thees - it consulting logo

Freelance IT Consultant (full time)

Sebastian Thees - IT Consulting
Worldwide
Advising management personnel in building scalable IT companies and setting a context for this. Additionally, guiding for company positioning, product strategy and product market fit. Providing insights into systemic thinking for mostly every aspect of the company.
Leading teams and assisting in coding for building web and platform applications.
01.2020 - 02.2022 (2 years, 2 months)
fulfillmenttools logo

Senior Software Engineer

fulfillmenttools (OC Fulfillment GmbH)
Cologne, Germany
Building a SaaS cloud platform implementing a distributed order management system for omnichannel sales customers.
"Hybrid" role as one of the first employees in the company to bootstrap the organization. A mix of laying out the technical foundation as well as advising management on how to build the company from organizational aspects.
  • Initially setup the SaaS platform in almost all technical aspects e.g. guide the software and infrastructure architecture, selection of languages and tools, design of the process to deliver value to the customer quickly and reliable.
  • Responsible for design and implementation of the build and continuous deployment pipeline levegaring a multi-tenant approach (where each customer gets its own independent environment) enabling extreme scaling the SaaS platform.
  • Established the initial ITSM / Support processes and provided supporting monitoring and alarming. Took also part in the rolling oncall team.
  • Reflected regularly about problems and subsequently proposed new approaches on how to scale the platform and build the backend interfaces mitigating bugs and communication overhead.
  • Mentored new employees to help them getting started and served as a trustful team member and lateral leader.
  • Conducted most interviews of applicants for technical roles (all kinds of software engineers, solution consultants, onboarding managers etc.)
Used Technologies: Typescript, Node.js, bash, Google Cloud Platform / serverless technologies (app engine, cloud run, cloud functions, google endpoints, firebase), Github Actions, Docker, Terraform, Firebase, MongoDB, REST APIs, GraphQL and more
06.2019 - 12.2020 (6 months)
rewe digital logo

Research Engineer / Senior Software Engineer

Rewe digital GmbH
Cologne, Germany
Research Engineer in Artificial Intelligence / Computer Vision for image classification
11.2015 - 12.2019 (4 years, 2 months)
rewe digital logo

Senior Software Engineer

Rewe digital GmbH
Cologne, Germany
Senior software engineer in e-commerce, checkout tribe in the team responsible for shopping carts and product updates
  • Led (lateral leadership) as a member of a 3-6 person cross-functional team for the conception, implementation and maintenance of shopping cart microservices (REST API and UI)
  • Consulted product owners and architects in business and technical questions
  • Coordinated teams about common features, architecture and collaboration
  • Conducted applicant interviews, helped to shape the process and assessed candidates
  • Counselled management on collaboration and organizational issues in the context of technology
Used Technologies: Java, Kotlin, groovy, typescript, docker, kubernetes, google cloud, ansible, tomcat, postgres, react.js, apache kafka, redis, microservices architecture, spring boot, REST API, ELK stack, jenkins, bamboo, debian linux
03.2017 - 08.2017 (6 months)
commercetools logo

Senior Software Engineer

commercetools Inc.
Durham, North Carolina, USA
Part of 'commercetools labs' team located in Durham, NC, USA.
  • Developed the first proof-of-concept of an integrated app-store like integration service to the commercetools frontend called 'merchant center' by which customers could enhance their feature set by simply booking feature-apps that got installed and configure automatically in the google cloud.
  • Originally started as a small task, the proof-of-concept led to 'commercetools labs' within the company to experiment with innovative ideas
Used Technologies: Node.js, docker, kubernetes, google cloud, java script, react.js, redux
02.2012 - 11.2015 (3 years, 10 months)
t-systems logo

IT Consultant and Software Developer in project: "SOA Backplane Designtime Team"

T-Systems International GmbH
Bonn, Germany
IT Consultant and Software Engineer in the "repository team" of the common international "SOA Backplane" for Deutsche Telekom AG.
  • Designed and implemented the central "SOA backplane" service repository of the Deutsche Telekom which held all T-Mobile and some T-Home business services.
    The repository was able to automatically generate and deploy the necessary and optionally customized configuration in the runtime layer to provide a link between the consumed and provided business services.
  • Used and enhanced model driven software approach (MDA) to fully generate database layer, entities, rich-client GUI (Eclipse RCP) and web GUI, thus enabled rapid changes of the whole SOA repository by just changing the UML meta model.
  • Coordinated feature development between SOA repository and SOA runtime team which led to a better common understanding of features, improved the delivered quality and reduced customer complaints.
  • Optimized the performance of the application, i.e. java garbage collection tuning, the persistance layer (hibernate and oracle database) and fixed memory leaks.
  • Analyzed, raised and estimated business requirements, realized and documented features, supported and trained testing departments from India and Russia about the software.
  • Advised the operations department during go-live and production incidents yielded in minimal downtime of the application.
  • Reported to and counseled the release management and supported in the release roadmap process for feature demands concluded in an optimized delivery for all customers.
Used Technologies: Java, UML, Hibernate, Eclipse RCP, Oracle DB, JBoss, OS: Solaris, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
04.2008 - 02.2012 (3 years, 11 months)
t-mobile logo

IT Consultant and Software Developer in project: "SOA Backplane Runtime Team"

T-Mobile Germany
Bonn, Germany
IT Consultant and Lead Software Engineer in the "runtime team" of the common international "SOA Backplane" for Deutsche Telekom AG.
  • Developed the national and international central SOA infrastructure runtime component "CAL" (serving HTTP and JMS) to fulfill the business needs of all T-Mobile and some T-Home BSS (business support systems).
  • Optimized the application to near real time performance (low pause garbage collector) resulting in low latency communication for the clients.
  • Established a new agile development process using SCRUM within the team which dramatically improved lead and cycle time.
  • Introduced continuous integration to the project with end-to-end testing the built components that ensured high quality results and less bugs.
  • Responsible for operation and third level support of the legacy SOA infrastructure.
  • Responsible for the migration of the legacy SOA bus to the newer "SOA Backplane".
  • Supported business clients in the transition phase that rendered an earlier shutdown of the legacy SOA than originally planned.
Used Technologies: Java, JMS (Tibco EMS, IBM MQ and ActiveMQ), HTTP(S), Web Services, Tomcat, Weblogic Application Server, Teamcity CI
01.2008 - 10.2015 (7 years, 10 month)
syngenio logo

IT Consultant

syngenio AG
Bonn, Germany
  • Supported mainly the Deutsche Telekom (German Telekom) and its subsidaries as an IT-Consultant / Software Developer (see above).
  • Further "rescued" and boosted the Arago GmbH and the Deutsche Bank (German Bank) project with Arago's AI system operator software.
  • Evaluated and estimated amount of work and risk for customer projects.
  • Mediated in sales meetings with customers to sell agile methodologies for a german bank.
04.2007 - 12.2007 (9 months)
syngenio logo

Master Thesis in a project assignment for 1&1 Internet AG

syngenio AG
Bonn, Germany
Title (translated): "Evaluation of Java scripting languages to build flexible business logic with dynamic webservices by taking the example of an Auto-Configuration Server (ACS)"
  • Analyzed the performance of several scripting languages and selected a suitable one for the java backend.
  • Implemented dynamic webservice stubs that were generated during runtime and connected them to the designed scripting interface.
  • Designed and implemented a sync-async interface between scripting language and SOAP webservices calls.
05.2005 - 08.2005 (4 months)
fraunhofer iais logo

Bachelor Thesis

Fraunhofer IMK/IAIS
Sankt Augustin, Germany
Title: "Accelerated Volume GPU Rendering with Shaders"
07.2004 - 09.2004 (3 months)
pironet ndh logo

Intern Consultant

PIRONET NDH
Cologne, Germany
  • Developed a company-internal time management tool for trainees with CMS Pirobase
  • Optimized and developed customer-specific CMS code (like widgets, controller logic and their views)
  • Assisted in going live with the custom-build components
Interesting?

Have a question or want more information?
I'll be happy to get in touch with you!

E-Mail me.Book a meeting over calendly.