About
I work between the strategy and the code, and I think that is the point.
I am Head of Quality Engineering at Thomann Music, based in Karlsruhe, Germany. I joined in September 2022 as the company's first quality engineer. Today six product teams ship with an embedded quality engineer, and I own the quality engineering strategy alongside product and engineering leadership. I also still read test failures myself, because a strategy you cannot trace back to a real pipeline is a slide deck.
My craft sits in clean systems and stable automation: Playwright architecture, CI pipeline design, test strategy, and the unglamorous work of making a failing test tell you the truth on the first read.
What I care about
Trust, clarity and coaching, in that order. The outcome I want from a quality function is not a bigger quality function. It is teams that own their own release confidence and do not need a central group to grant it. A quality engineering team should create capability, not dependency. So I ask my engineers to be quality ambassadors rather than testers: in every ceremony of their product team, bringing the system-level view of risk, and teaching developers to test their own work well. Quality is a property of how a team works, not a phase at the end.
That belief is also why I take AI-assisted engineering seriously and carefully at the same time. Tooling can investigate, draft and challenge findings. Publication, approval and merge stay with a person who can be asked why. Inside my own team that means agents that review pull requests, keep dependencies current, report on coverage and prepare refinement, each producing evidence a person reads and decides on. AI changes the speed of the work, not the bar it has to meet.
Before this
More than fifteen years across IBM, 1&1 Mail & Media, LogMeIn and Thomann, starting in Bangalore and continuing in Germany. I moved here as an international student, took a Master’s in International Business IT Consulting at Hochschule Offenburg, and was awarded Best International Student of 2019 by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Arriving as an outsider is part of why coaching matters to me.
Away from work: music, travel, and small projects that exist because I wanted the thing to exist. Some of them end up on GitHub.