Dirk Hufnagel

Being a technologist by heart, I help organizations to build great solutions by understanding the business and driving innovation.

Professional Summary

I am connecting business with IT, requirements with solutions, ideas with innovation and most important, engineers with the product vision.

As Principal Consultant at itopia AG, I help financial service customers to gain speed and efficienty to compete in a dynamic environment. In this role, it is key, to communicate in the right language with the right level of stakeholders, to build a culture of trust and to drive decisions. I use my broad experience from tech to management to identify areas of improvement and to help our customers thrive.

As Principal Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services(AWS), I helped customers to build sustainable, reliable and secure architectures, based on state-of-the-art (cloud) technologies.

As former CTO of TWINT, I am used to communicate from Board and C-level to engineering teams, sharing technology vision and understanding business need and opportunities. This was successful by combining my broad technical background with leadership experience.

As a people manager in various roles, I learned, that leadership and management are two very different topics and that leading people requires a vision, good communication and the buy in of your team. It is not about hierarchy; it is about mutual trust.

At TWINT, I had the honor to be part of an amazing team, changing the behavior of a whole country when it comes to daily payments and money transfers.

Work Experience

07/2023 - today - Principal Consultant
itopia AG
Zurich - Switzerland

  • Connecting management, business and IT in the financial service industry
  • Accelerate digital transformation and journey to the cloud
  • Optimize organizational structures and processes to gain efficiency

09/2022 - 06/2023 - Principal Solutions Architect
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Zurich - Switzerland

  • Working at the intersection of AWS, AWS customers and AWS partners
  • Supporting the cutomers to build sustainable, cost efficient, scalable, elastic and secure solutions
  • Help improve the customers agility and ability to innovate fast
  • Drive customers cloud adoption

06/2021 - 08/2022 - CTO
Twint AG
Zurich - Switzerland

  • Responsible for all technical and architectural aspects of the mobile payment system TWINT
  • Line Manager of 4 Lead Architects and functional management of engineering teams
  • Driving large technology initiatives like journey to the cloud, system resilience, target architecture and DevOps transition.
  • Direct collaboration with internal and external stakeholders on all levels.
  • Member of Management Comitee of TWINT AG

06/2020 - 06/2021 - Lead Application Architect
Twint AG
Zurich - Switzerland

  • Responsible for improving, evolving, and disrupting the architecture of the mobile payment system TWINT
  • Functional Manager of 6 Solution Architects and up to 20 Engineers on site, near- and off shore
  • Leading Application Architecture Community of Practice
  • Develop solution architectures together with business and partners Lead
  • Own and support projects and initiatives
  • Evaluation, implementation and optimization of methods, tools, and procedures
  • Recruiting

02/2019 - 06/2020 - Head of Software Engineering
Twint AG
Zurich - Switzerland

  • Responsible for improving the architecture of the mobile payment system TWINT
  • Lead the software engineering department with up to 60 employees, on site, near- and off shore. Responsible for all staff, financial and professional aspects.
  • Direct lead of Architecture Team
  • Develop solution designs together with business and partners
  • Evaluation, implementation and optimization of new methods, tools, and procedures
  • Negotiate contracts with international software partners.
  • Responsible for in-time, in-budget and in scope delivery of software releases.
  • Owning target architecture of TWINT

08/2018 - 01/2019 - Head of Architecture
Twint AG
Zurich - Switzerland

  • Responsible for improving the architecture of the mobile payment system TWINT
  • Lead the architecture team of TWINT with up to 8 software, mobile and system architects
  • Develop solution designs together with business and partners
  • Owning target architecture of TWINT

02/2013 - 07/2018 - Software Architect
ti&m AG
Zurich - Switzerland

  • Work as external consultant, software architect and software engineer for different customers, mainly in the financial industry sector.
  • responsibility as technical project lead and ScrumMaster and collaborated with different stakeholders to make the projects a success.

10/2011 - 01/2013 - Senior Consultant / Software Architect
ACG GmbH
Frankfurt a.M. - Germany

  • Lead Java development department.
  • Collaborate with executive board in setting up the department and defining its strategic direction.
  • Co-Responsible for decisions about technical direction, acquisition of new and management as well as expansion of existing client mandates.
  • Contracting for a large key account as Software Engineer.

01/2009 - 09/2011 - Technical Project Manager / Senior Software Engineer
Fraport AG
Frankfurt a.M. - Germany

  • Technical Project Manager and Software Engineer for an innovative access control gates and passenger flow management system which went successfully live while I was responsible or it.
  • Change Management to optimize software development processes between several departments of the airport. Introduces common workflow to gain more cross department efficiency.

08/2005 - 12/2008 - Senior IT-Consultant / Software Architect
Novatec GmbH
Leinfelde-Echterdingen - Germany

  • Software Engineering for various, different customers in Germany, Switzerland, and Luxembourg with focus on Java/JEE.
  • Lead multiple trainings for large customer in Saudi Arabia with focus on Software Engineering with Java/JEE and software engineering methodologies.

Education

02/2017 - 03/2022 - Master of Advanced Studies (MAS) - IT-Leadership and TechManagement
ZAHW - Zurich University of Applied Sciences

Best of class evaluation of Master Thesis
“Process design for an efficient and motivating technology management in agile software development organizations of FinTech companies”

09/2002 - 07/2005 - Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) - Computer Science
Major in Software Engineering
HFT - Stuttgart University of Applied Sciences

09/1999 - 07/2002 - Apprenticeship - IT Specialist for System Integration
Step- Computer und Datentechnik GmbH
Lörrach - Germany

Skills and Technologies

Skill Years of Experience
IT Management 5+
IT Strategy 5+
Technology Management 5+
Software Engineering 15+
Software-, Solution and Enterprise Architecture 15+
Design of de-coupled and loosely coupled architectures 10+
Microservice Architectures 10+
Scalable, Resilient and Elastic Architectures 5+
Agile Methodologies and Processes 10+
DevOps 5+
Data and Analytics 15+

Training and Certification

AWS Solutions Architect Associate AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate (CSAA)

ScrumAlliance Certified Scrum Master ScrumAlliance Certified Scrum Master (CSM)

iSAQB CPSAF Certified Professional for Software Architecture - Foundation Level (CPSA-F)

PMI PMP Project Management Institute - Project Management Professional (PMP)

Languages

  • German - native speaker
  • English - fluent