casasoft.ch | SMG — Bottighofen / Zürich, CH

Lead Developer · Full Stack Developer · 2017 – 2024

Led a team of 10+ developers spread across Europe and built the CASAONE real estate CMS and the ICASA marketplace for the Swiss market.

• Built the 0→1 multilingual CASAONE CMS for real estate agents; started as a team of two owning the whole stack and grew it to 10+ services.
• Handled multiple infrastructure migrations: Digital Ocean → OpenShift → on-premise Rancher → AWS Kubernetes + Rancher, with infrastructure as code.
• Increased code coverage from 0 to 80% and added SonarQube to CI.
• Migrated services from Laminas and Laravel to Symfony with API Platform and upgraded PHP across services from 5.4.x to 8.x.
• Moved React class components to hooks and TypeScript; focused later on backend, code standardisation, infrastructure, technical debt and hiring.
• Built the 0→1 multilingual ICASA real estate marketplace, which reached 3rd place in the Swiss real estate marketplace ranking.
• Developed a CASAWEB WordPress plugin mapping distances and travel times to nearby amenities around a property.
• Continued the Swiss standard for property exchange, SwissRETS, in collaboration with other real estate companies.

eLocations.com — Zürich, CH

CTO · Lead Developer · Project Manager · Online Marketeer · 2015 – 2017

Full-stack development of elocations.com, refactoring the existing code into a maintainable, documented structure.

• Implemented the inline CMS editor, performance improvements, custom map solution, newsletter tool and search engine.
• Added analytics, continuous delivery and authentication across the platform.

Location Group & eLocations.com — Zürich, CH

Junior Project Manager · Developer · 2015

Built the showcase microsite for elocations.com.

FiPiGo — Filter, Pick & Go — London / Dörflingen

Founder · Lead Developer · Designer · Online Marketeer · 2014 – 2015

“Building the 1st Search Engine in the language travel industry”

While still being at University I already had the urge to start something on my own. The prospect of building something from scratch, nurturing an idea into a working business is something that fascinates me. There are so many parts involved bringing an idea to fruition. No day is the same and there are endless problems to be solved, which gives you the opportunity to learn something new every day. Exploring new ways, finding solutions, improve the status quo and being challenged is what I love about such projects.

With this particular project I wanted to see how far I could go on my own, learning by doing with the help of the endless knowledge of the internet. My knowledge got pushed to expand intensively in about every aspect surrounding a modern website, now that I had to take care of everything myself.

If it was learning about designing a website, a logo, developing the UX, writing efficient CSS, understanding and building the whole backend with API’s, MongoDB and MySQL databases, setting up VM’s on Cloud Platforms (Azure and AWS) or developing a business model, on every corner there was something I didn’t understand at first and it felt like loose puzzle pieces that would eventually come together once I understood enough of it. Additionally the biggest challenge was learning how to code Python (Django, Scrapy), JavaScript, AngularJS and integrating it all into HTML. I won’t go too much into detail about this learning process, since it would unfortunately go far beyond the scope of this document. Overall learning how to code and being able to connect all the loose ends at the end has closed many gaps and provided me with a much more holistic understanding of everything involved in web projects. Learning about the process of coding, the endless possibilities and the difficulty of making the right choice for being future proof, not ending up in messy spaghetti code, gave me a much better understanding of the needs and abilities of Developers.

This whole process pushed my self-motivation and endurance to a whole new level. All this experience, the ability to solve complex problems, my strong self-motivation, endurance and assertiveness is what I will bring to any task you will put me on.

Kaplan International Colleges — London / Zürich

Online Marketing Manager · August 2013 – June 2014 (11 months)

Kaplan International Colleges offers language immersion experiences around the world and is well known for the high quality and academic rigour of its courses. It is also renowned for exam preparation courses such as GMAT, TOEFL, IELTS and Cambridge Exams and more.

After 8 months as Online Marketing Assistant I got promoted to Online Marketing Manager. With the new role I now took over full responsibility and became product owner of the new website as well as the WordPress website. Besides being part of the scrum meetings, writing all the stories and defining the priorities of the features, tasks like a new SEO strategy, improving overall tracking and implementing further features to integrate legacy systems came with this new role. I also took over the PPC account for the Swiss-German market and overhauled it completely, with expanding the account to cover the whole market in the most cost-efficient way, which in return improved the CPC by cutting it in half, while raising Conversions by 30% and the CTR from 3% tripled to 9%. I also implemented new targeting strategies and started new campaigns with other providers like Ad roll, to generate more customers. To implement a full customer cycle with the new CRM (Salesforce) was another big task that I took responsibility for. Part of that was also the Email Marketing Channel that had to be integrated with Salesforce to complete that customer cycle and to make trigger and automated Emails possible, to further shorten the response time. New mobile friendly templates got implemented with the help of the Email and Design Department.

With the offline marketing Team in Zurich I worked closely to review, plan and implement a new Marketing Strategy for 2014 to close the gap between off- and online marketing and improve tracking of the overall performance. To improve the communication and coordination between the different stakeholders I worked with several departments to create accurate, monthly reports for all Marketing Channels. Hiring new staff for my team, training and managing them, by organizing their tasks, setting their goals with them, as well as giving them performance reviews was another big part of my new role.

As Online Marketing Manager I learned a lot more about how to realize an idea with involving and satisfying all stake holders. I enjoyed my role as a product owner since my technical background was a great asset to bridge the gap between the developers and all other stakeholders and my organizational skills and attention to detail were of great help. Managing my team locally, as well as abroad gave me the opportunity to learn more about how to motivate and push people to better perform, while having more fun and satisfaction at it.

Kaplan International Colleges — London / Zürich

Online Marketing Assistant · December 2012 – July 2013 (8 months)

When my internship was about to finish at Kaplan I got offered a permanent role as Online Marketing Assistant. With the permanent position came new responsibilities. With my team, the Development, Design and SEO Department and Content Editors, I implemented new features to the website, improved the Customer journeys and overall usability of the new website. As well as the main website I still was in charge of improving and maintaining the WordPress website for a local business. I took over the PPC Account for the local business and worked on expanding the market coverage and improving the CPL. Another new task was to implement a new CRM system (Salesforce) and integrate it with legacy systems. I also helped to improve the Email Marketing Channel with the implementation of a new Newsletter layout, better tracking implementation and cleaning up of the Customer Database.

I also gave training for the CMS (Tridion & WordPress) to my colleagues.

Overall I took over more responsibility which greatly helped me to learn how to bring the many stake holders together behind a long term goal. I also started in certain areas to manage my colleague’s workflow and helped to improve the overall productiveness of the business.

Kaplan International Colleges — London / Zürich

Online Marketing Internship · May 2012 – December 2012 (8 months)

My work with Kaplan so far has included building an entirely new website for a subsidiary, which involved working together with the design department to define the new look, the development department to implement new functionality and the SEO department to ensure positioning in the web and also inluded rewriting the entire content .

Besides the main website I also created an entirely new Microsite from scratch with Wordpress (www.rhzsprachen.ch) and I am working on improving the social media presence (Facebook, G+, Youtube, Twitter). My colleague and I also set up the E-Mail Marketing Channel with creating a Newsletter and a Birthday E-Mail.

I am also managing two PPC accounts, one for the Main Website (improved by 65% since takeover) and another one for the Microsite (which together with the new website increased sales by a 100%).

Another project I am working on is integrating the existing CRM System with Salesforce to be able to better follow up the customer journey from Lead to Sale.