Professionally, I have held technology & business leadership positions serving a variety of industries across Europe. As a consultant, I have been working directly with organisations to build clear, coherent and scalable products. My work is recognized by several large organizations, including eBay, PayPal and Adobe, among others.
In recent years I’ve become more and more interested in the methods of leading teams and how to work smarter. That is, how the well-being of each team member is kept central while the work can progress in a smooth way. Today I work with businesses to help them make a meaningful impact within their industry. I bring a critical eye to the development process, and advocate renewal over wholesale reinvention.
2020—Present
CEO & CTO
Preis.de, Berlin
2007—Present
Technology Consultant
Independent, Berlin
2018—2020
Accelerator Builder
Trotec GmbH, Berlin
2016—2018
CTO
Dr. Förster AG, Berlin
2012—2015
Founder & CTO
23 Digital Concepts GmbH, Vienna
2012—2013
Head of E-Commence
P&P Medien, Innsbruck
2010—2012
Engineering Manager
VIP Sportnahrung GmbH, Vienna
2008—2010
Full-stack Magento Developer
Blickvang, Vienna
2006—2008
Software Engineer
SAFA Academy, Vienna
I was born in 1988 in Karachi, a city of 20+ million people in Pakistan. I spent most of my early childhood with my family in Karachi and in the early 2000s we permanently settled in Vienna, Austria.
In 2005, I got my first gig to build a large web portfolio for a film production company. They needed a backend to manage a large video library and showcase it on their website. As the only developer, I used Joomla as a content management system and had to learn it fast while improving my programming & product development skills.
Dealing with a large open-source codebase like Joomla was a pain. But at the same time, it gave me a lot of insights on how to navigate around complexity and focus on the outcome without knowing every single bit about the system.
In April 2008, I started experimenting with open source project called Magento and it changed everything. It was one of the most sophisticated and over-engineered shop system built to date.
To be honest, it was painful to learn and operate Magento in the beta phase. But it solved tons of business problems in e-commerce. Within a few years, most e-commerce companies in Europe started adopting it and all sudden I was getting a lot of projects.
I was building shops, marketplaces, pos-systems, data warehouses, and ERP connectors. I got to learn a lot in a short period and it also enabled me to travel around Europe to work on some amazing projects and meet tons of wonderful people excited about building their new startups or scaling their current online businesses.