Leon Köllerwirth Hlihel

Professional experience

Built means written myself. Led means people. Steered means partners, portfolio and dates.

1. since 11/2020

   BUILT · STEERED

   Independent IT architect

   Architecture consulting · Bielefeld · Remote

   02/2022 – 12/2025 · four years

   SMA Solar · Chief Product Owner on mandate

   Helped build the architecture platform for the embedded software.

   • Steered roadmap, releases and dependencies across several teams.
   • Selected international partners and suppliers.
   • Supported the rollout of the three products across three markets.
   • Advising on the modernisation of grown, production-critical systems, through to architecture decision records (ADRs) in a regulated environment.
   • Sartorius, 04/2021 to 01/2022: cloud strategy and licensing model. The first engagement.
   • Currently StudyWithMe, on behalf of the Medical University of Varna in Bulgaria.
   • Alongside that, continuous platform development of my own, among them razbiram.com.

2. 11/2016 – 10/2020

   LED · STEERED

   Enterprise Architecture Manager, later Information Security Officer

   Daimler Mobility (today Mercedes-Benz Mobility) · Stuttgart

   • Led the enterprise architecture team of eight people.
   • Assessed the application portfolio, consolidated it and derived the transformation roadmaps from it.
   • Helped shape cloud strategy and cloud governance across Azure and AWS. Negotiated and introduced an Azure development framework for Daimler Mobility.
   • Owned cutover and migration projects, among them Zurich and Salzburg, without downtime in live operation.
   • Picked the international service providers.
   • From 2019 as information security officer responsible for ISMS and ISO 27001 across banking and leasing, down to the point-of-sale systems. Plus MaRisk and BAIT in a BaFin-regulated environment.

3. 2006 – 11/2016

   BUILT · LED · STEERED

   Head of Development

   Tönnies · Rheda-Wiedenbrück

   fTrace, the batch tracing system

   Co-developed and taken into operation. Today an industry standard in meat processing.

   • First headed portal development, then group-wide software development.
   • The group had around 8,000 people, IT 50 to 80.
   • Helped build the group-wide IT landscape, from greenfield to live operation across seven plants.
   • Built and ran production and machine control, ERP, MES, logistics, portal, apps, pricing and CRM.
   • In the last years introduced the microservice architecture and Kafka for the event streams between the plants.
   • Introduced a group-wide data warehouse. KPI and balanced-scorecard reporting for production control ran on it.
   • Set the group's technology and security standards, and ran and secured the whole IT landscape.
   • Led a team of five to ten developers and built near- and offshore teams in Europe and Asia. Did the recruiting for it myself.
   • Owned make-or-buy decisions and picked the service providers for them.

4. 04/2004 – 2006

   BUILT

   Software developer

   Tönnies · Rheda-Wiedenbrück

   • Started as a developer, straight on the shop floor. Implemented machine control and warehouse logistics myself.
   • Close to the hardware in C. Part of the control ran on single-board computers.
   • Above it the Java side, EJB on JBoss and later Spring, wired through a service bus and connected to the control via JNI.
   • Device and warehouse technology control at the production sites. It went in while the plants kept running.