👤 Phil
"Hope for the best, prepare for the worst"
I lead technical delivery and quality across the full AI-first SDLC — from architecture and requirements through agentic spec-driven development to release governance and operational stability.
Operated as Full-stack Tech Lead/Architect, Technical Project Manager, and QA Manager across distributed, multi-vendor environments in compliance-heavy E-commerce and Mobility domains. Practicing leadership via governance, coaching, and delivery ownership. Goal: build capabilities for sustainable and KPI-measurable change through hands-on technical coaching, quality gates, and lived processes with owners.
Driven by a strong sense of ownership and responsibility, I anticipate issues and act proactively, while balancing quality with economic considerations without neglecting pragmatic solutions.
- Org-scale governance: drove ISO27001 audit readiness and company-wide QA initiatives spanning >10 engineering teams as part of whole-SDLC QA redesign
- Quality governance: reduced UAT defect leakage from 80% to 20% and CFR from 50% to 5% while raising smoke coverage from ~60% to >95%
- SDLC improvement: cut cycle time by 44%, failed approvals by 35%, and incidents by 23%; raised squad-health metrics by 17% within ~6 months
- QA operations: reduced regression runtime from >8h to <2h, improved defect leakage by 18%, reduced rejected bugs by 38%, and cut QA onboarding from 3.5 to 2 weeks
- Knowledge scaling: grew weekly developer CoP from ~15 participants into multiple formats serving ~20–40 participants each
Tech Management#
- Shift-left agentic AI SDLC including hands-on coaching, strategy, and governance: from requirements engineering and agentic AI engineering workflows to release, monitoring, and incident response
- Metrics/KPI optimization: DORA, Squad Health, SPACE, feature/risk coverage, test effort, incident impact, etc.
- Engineering Culture and Org Change
- IT Compliance (e.g. GDPR, ISO27001)
- Technical Project Ownership, e.g. release automation from >8h to 10min with GitOps or ISO27001 audit readiness
- Stakeholder Management and Cross-functional Facilitation
- Multi-vendor Management
- Engineering Leadership from roadmap and team leadership to executive reporting and Agile Coaching (certified)
- Event-driven Microservices/QA/Cloud Solution Architecture
Domains#
- E-commerce: Checkout, Orders, and Payment
- Mobility Services
QA#
- Unit | Int/Service: Testcontainers, Dev Containers | Contract/API: OpenAPI, Pact | UI: Selenium, Playwright | Load: k6 | Static: SonarQube | SAST/DAST: DefectDojo, OWASP ZAP | Infra: Chaos Monkey
- Risk-based Testing/Requirements Traceability Matrix, Xray
- TDD/BDD: Cucumber, Jira Automation, DoD/DoR
- Monitoring (alerts, metrics, logs, RUM, APM): Datadog, Grafana, Kibana/ES/OS, Sentry.io, OTel
Project / Knowledge Management#
- Team leadership (e.g. 2x 5 engineers) and technical project leadership (e.g. QA or compliance governance across >10 teams)
- Scrum (of Scrums, Nexus), Certified Scrum Product Owner
- PlantUML/Mermaid, C4, BPMN, Communities of Practice 1, MkDocs, ADRs, Backstage.io, Playbooks
Software Engineering#
- Claude Code, Codex | Spec-driven Development, subagents, skills/MCPs, hooks/loops, multi-layered graph contexts…
- DDD | Microservices | Event-driven: Kafka
- Java Spring, PHP Symfony, NestJS TypeScript | PostgreSQL, MongoDB
DevSecOps / Cloud#
- AWS/StackIT (compute, blob storage, DBs, networking, secrets, observability, K8s, IAM)
- GitHub, GitLab, Jenkins
- ArgoCD GitOps, Terraform/Terragrunt IaC
- K8s, Helm, Istio
- STRIDE, OWASP | Digital Certificates and PKI, Secrets Management | IAM, (m)TLS, OIDC, OAuth2 | RBAC, ACLs, Least Privilege, Audit Trails | DoS/CDN, Input Validation, WAF
📈 Personal development#
Outside of work, I’m interested in building a healthy, curious and sustainable life.
A few recurring themes I care about are fitness & nutrition, continuous learning & teaching, minimalism & mindfulness, as well as psychology & habit systems.
I like staying open, experimenting and figuring out what works in practice or rather how. Different perspectives can be useful in different contexts, and this blog exists in part to capture, share and iterate on those learnings.
🛠️ Tech, DIY & Fun#
Games fascinate me in many forms: video — especially retro and indie — board, park or escape room games. These days, the design and mechanics behind them are increasingly what keeps the hobby fresh for me.
I like making, fixing and improving things because they combine creativity, craft and engineering: small (electronic) practical gadgets, furniture, home improvement or occasional artsy projects. I enjoy understanding how something works, improving it and making it more useful, elegant or fun.
Cooking and baking are special passion topics for me, where experimentation, skill development and artistic expression can come together in something that is also highly relatable and useful to almost everybody.
Creating free content takes 💵 money (e.g. hosting this site) and 💪 effort.
If you like, you can support me via PayPal