About Daniel
I'm a technology leader with 20+ years of experience building and scaling engineering organisations in product-driven SaaS and fintech environments.
I step in as Interim CTO or Head of Engineering when companies need clear technical direction, team stability, and delivery momentum — fast.
Most recently, I served as Interim CTO at FinCompare (Berlin-based SME financing platform), where I led the engineering organisation through a post-merger integration, rebuilt team structure, and drove measurable improvements across delivery, quality, and developer experience. Prior to that, I spent nearly nine years at smava — Germany's leading loan comparison platform — growing from Senior Engineer to Director of Software Engineering and building cross-functional teams of 35+ engineers.
What I bring to an interim engagement:
→ Immediate clarity. I assess tech stack, team health, and delivery processes quickly and communicate a clear, honest picture to leadership.
→ Monolith-to-microservices experience. I've led multiple modernisation programmes, including event-driven architecture migration and Domain-Driven Design adoption.
→ DORA metrics focus. At FinCompare, I took deployment frequency and change failure rate to top-industry benchmarks within 7 months by introducing CI/CD improvements, test automation, and observability practices.
→ People-first leadership. I've built career ladders, coached engineers into team leads, and kept teams stable through post-merger uncertainty and headcount reductions.
→ Business alignment. I work closely with CPO, CFO, and the board level to translate technical strategy into business outcomes — not just engineering for its own sake.
Tech background: Java · Spring Boot · Kotlin · AWS · Kubernetes ·
event-driven systems · microservices · DDD · Event Storming · CI/CD · DORA metrics · Python · TypeScript
I'm based in Berlin and open to hybrid engagements across the EU (remote-first, with regular on-site availability).
English
Native or bilingual
German
Basic
Polish
Native or bilingual
Can work on-site
Berlin (up to 50km)
Experience
- suszczynski.devIndependent Consultant · Interim CTO & Engineering Leader · AI-Assisted DeveloperE-COMMERCEJune 2025 - Today (1 year)Berlin, GermanyIndependent Consultant & Engineering Leader specialising in interim CTO mandates, fractional engineering leadership, and architecture advisory. Currently building a production-grade AI agentic application in Java, Spring Boot, and Next.js — using Claude API with multi-agent orchestration (Opus as master orchestrator, Sonnet for mid-complexity tasks) and local Ollama for cost-optimised workloads. Daily practitioner of AI-assisted development tooling, including Claude Code, Windsurf Cascade, and GitHub Copilot across the full stack. This hands-on work keeps my technical depth current alongside leadership engagements and gives me a grounded, practical perspective on where AI creates genuine leverage for engineering teams — and where it introduces architectural risk. Available for interim, fractional, and advisory engagements. Immediately available.
- FinCompareSmarter Business Finance Head of EngineeringBANKING AND INSURANCEMay 2023 - May 2025 (2 years)Berlin, Germany
- Owned technology strategy and execution for a fintech platform serving SME financing, reporting directly to CEO/COO.
- Successfully led the transformation of the technology organisation by implementing modern operational models, including Team Topologies and Domain-Driven Design (DDD).
- Directly supported revenue growth and partner satisfaction through improvements in matching, data foundations, and platform reliability.
- Developed Technical Strategy hand in hand with Product Vision and Strategy, accelerating business.
- Carefully planned initiatives allowed me to implement actual ownership and autonomy within the technology department, which led to a significant improvement in performance.
- By leveraging Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), I aligned teams around customer-centric outcomes, driving performance improvements and directly improving the company's results.
- Managed a cross-functional technology department of over 30 professionals, covering software engineering, cloud infrastructure (AWS), data warehousing, IT security and support.
- My leadership extended to optimising lean product development processes and fostering a culture of tech excellence, collaboration, creativity, and mentorship through growth plans and a career ladder framework.
- Introduced a comprehensive DWH to emphasise data-driven decision-making.
- Heavily reduced technical legacy from a tangled monolith to a clean, event-driven architecture, improving scalability and maintainability.
- Spearheaded significant quality improvements by implementing test automation and new cutting-edge cloud infrastructure with modern CI/CD and Agile practices, achieving the highest industry standards measured by 4 DORA metrics within 7 months.
- Bolstered IT security practices, leading to higher compliance standards toward ISMS certification and ISO-27001 compliance.
- smava GmbHDirector Software EngineeringBANKING AND INSURANCEJanuary 2021 - April 2023 (2 years and 3 months)Berlin/Brandenburg Metropolitan Region, Germany
- Owned the Banking and Matching domain of the smava platform, leading six cross-functional teams (35+ engineers, product, and data).
- Managed the highly complex data migration of smava’s data from the old on-premises platform to a new cloud-based system, ensuring stability and security during the transition, even after a significant reduction in engineering and product headcount.
- Played a pivotal role in technology modernisation, architecting a new microservices-based platform that transformed complex monolithic applications into agile, domain-specific services.
- During the Post-Merger Integration (PMI), I managed the entire technical migration to a unified platform while maintaining the legacy system's optimal performance during the transition.
- Played a key role in the Cloud Migration (AWS) project and served as interim Technical Product Owner for both the DevOps and Platform teams.
- Built and led the Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE) team to drive the Mobilise phase and acted as the Hiring Manager for Staff and Senior Backend Engineers, Engineering Managers, and DevOps/Platform Engineers.
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Education
- Oracle Certified Associate, Java SE 7 Programmer Splunk Certified UserOracle Certified Associate, Java SE 7 Programmer Splunk Certified User
- MA, Computer Science - Software EngineeringWrocław University of Science and Technology2009MA, Computer Science - Software Engineering