Stefan Bauer

Wikando GmbH — Tech Lead

Remote, 12/2024 - today

• Architected a micro frontend migration strategy, decoupling a legacy monolith to enable independent deployments and accelerate delivery.
• Standardized frontend development across teams via shared meeting formats, streamlined processes, and unified coding guidelines.
• Introduced company-wide AI-assisted engineering practices, integrating workflows that increased development velocity and improved code quality.
• Improved change and release management as operations lead, significantly reducing deployment risk, downtime, and cross-team coordination overhead.
• Defined and enforced company-wide engineering best practices as part of the technical enablement team.
• Identified and resolved critical security vulnerabilities, strengthening system resilience.
• Led a six-person engineering team in delivering new features across both the legacy system and newly developed services.
• Mentored team members and provided hands-on technical leadership.

betterbusiness GmbH — Staff Engineer

Remote, 02/2024 - 12/2024

• Spearheaded the modernization of two large Symfony applications, enhancing performance and scalability while fighting technical debt.
• Developed microservices and productivity tools using PHP, Node, and Go.
• Coordinated version control within the developer team, ensuring seamless integration and reducing the amount of merge conflicts by almost 100%.
• Managed project coordination with external collaborators, streamlining communication and project timelines.

betterbusiness GmbH — Senior Software Developer

Remote, 01/2022 - 02/2024

• Designed and developed an in-house A/B tracking tool using Symfony and Vue.js, enabling more effective performance analysis.
• Created microservices with Go and Node for an existing sales-tracking system, significantly improving data quality.
• Collaborated with an external agency to set up a data warehouse including a sophisticated ETL pipeline and a custom analytics setup with Snowplow.

betterbusiness services GmbH — Senior Software Developer

Berlin, 01/2020 - 01/2022

• Designed and developed a landing page builder with Symfony, enabling a team of fewer than five people to maintain over 1,000 landing pages.
• Created a highly efficient sales-tracking tool with Symfony, successfully tracking an 8-digit number of global sales to date.
• Built an API related to said sales-tracking tool with express, allowing business partners to gain insight into their sales performance.

betterbusiness GmbH — Senior Software Developer

Berlin, 08/2018 - 01/2020

• Developed a sophisticated product comparison SPA with Vue.js and GraphQL, helping users make well-informed purchases.
• Built an elegant backend for said SPA with Symfony and EasyAdmin.
• Created a robust in-house CRM tool with Symfony, streamlining workflows and improving data organization.
• Built a lead broker platform with Symfony, facilitating efficient lead management and distribution.
• Designed and developed a website builder template generator with Angular and Node, enabling rapid showcase creation.

7leads GmbH — Software Developer

Berlin, 04/2014 - 08/2018

• Developed a product comparison website generator with CodeIgniter and jQuery that was the basis of more than 50 product comparison sites.
• Built a web scraper with Node, which added thousands of products to these comparison websites.
• Created an extensive tech magazine and three large health-related magazines using CraftCMS, providing engaging and informative content platforms for millions of German-speaking users.
• Designed an embeddable checkout system with Angular, enabling e-commerce integration in almost any website.

netfame GmbH — Web Development Intern

Berlin, 01/2014 - 04/2014

• Developed SEO blogs with WordPress, driving increased organic traffic and improving search engine rankings.
• Created frontends for several insurance comparison websites, enhancing usability and user engagement.

Master of Arts, Linguistics & Web Technology

Philipps-Universität Marburg

10/2010 – 09/2012 — Grade 1.5 (very good)

Focus on cognitive linguistics and web development

Bachelor of Arts, Anglophone Studies

Philipps-Universität Marburg

10/2007 – 09/2010 — Grade 1.8 (good)

Focus on linguistic engineering

New Zealand — Work & Travel

10/2012 - 07/2013

Donor Portal

A white-label solution that was specifically designed for NGOs. It allows donors to directly access their donation receipts, edit their contact information, and update or cancel recurring donations. The platform significantly reduces administrative overhead and the amount of customer support tickets.

Donation and Customer-Relationship Management System

NGOs can manage their customer relations and their fundraising processes with this comprehensive, more than 15 years old all-in-one solution. Key features include a mailing list, embeddable donation forms, payment method management, comprehensive duplicate handling for contact data, and dashboards for detailed data insights.

Affiliate Management and Sales-Tracking System

I worked on a global-scale sales-tracking system connected to all major affiliate marketing platforms, e.g. Impact, Awin, and Tune. As of today, an 8-digit number of sales was tracked with this tool. It is over half a decade old and has been modernized several times. The real power of this tool comes from its ability to map data from many platforms onto a unified model.

Landing Page Builder

A small team of less than five people can manage over 1,000 landing pages with this tool. It allows you to create small page fragments, so-called blocks, and combine them to landing pages. Pages can be published world-wide and in many different languages. Pages are automatically tested by an extensive Playwright test suite. Automated lighthouse checks monitor web vital degradation.

A/B Testing Tool

This time-saving tool facilitates the evaluation and aggregation of test data, featuring seamless integrations with leading A/B testing SaaS tools like Google Optimize, Optimizely, Unbounce, and Intellimize. Additionally, it provides an overview of available test spaces—such as landing pages and applications not currently running tests—and serves as a centralized hub for collecting and evaluating test ideas

Developer Productivity CLI Tool

Manual tasks are inherently prone to errors. To streamline operations, I developed an in-house CLI tool automating various tasks, such as the creation and tagging of Jira tickets based on Slack messages, the general version control workflow of the product team, and the generation of changelog entries. Following its adoption by the team, the tool reduced merge conflicts by nearly 100%.