Available for leadership roles & interim engagements

Daniel Suszczynski

> Engineering Leader | Fractional CTO | Building with AI

20 years of building and scaling engineering organisations in fintech and SaaS. From hands-on architecture to leading 60+ engineers across multiple domains.

Now working with founders and companies across Europe, combining organisational scaling experience with hands-on AI-assisted development. Open to permanent, fractional, and interim engagements.

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Daniel Suszczynski
20+
Years Experience
60+
Team Size Led

// About Me

Engineering Leader Who Still Builds

I combine 20 years of engineering leadership with a hands-on approach to AI-assisted development. I believe the most effective engineering leaders understand the tools their teams use, and today that means working directly with AI to write, review, and ship code.

I have built and scaled engineering organisations from small teams to 60+ engineers across fintech and SaaS. I have driven platform transformations, modernised legacy systems, and introduced domain-driven design, event-driven architectures, and data-driven decision making. At smava, I led teams that built a matching engine and bank integrations powering one of Germany's largest lending platforms. At FinCompare, I owned the entire technology function as interim CTO, reporting to the CEO.

I work with companies across Europe on a fractional or project basis, as well as in permanent leadership roles. Whether it is a 2-day-a-week engagement to set technical direction, a 3-month interim mandate to stabilise an engineering organisation, or a long-term leadership position, the approach is the same: understand the business, build the right structure, ship with discipline.

Right now, I am actively building with AI-assisted development, shipping products for founders and business contacts from my network. This is not theoretical. It is practical, daily work that shapes how I think about team structure, developer productivity, and what engineering organisations will look like in the next 2-3 years.

Engineering Strategy & Execution
Defining technology direction and turning it into reliable, predictable delivery.
Scaling Teams & Organizations
Growing engineering organizations from small teams to 60+ engineers while improving quality and velocity.
Architecture & System Design
Designing domain-oriented, event-driven architectures using DDD, C4 models, and fitness functions.
Business Alignment & Domain Ownership
Aligning teams to business domains with clear ownership, OKRs, and accountability for outcomes.
Developer Experience & Platform Enablement
Reducing friction through paved paths, self-service infrastructure, and DORA & SPACE-driven improvements.
Delivery Quality & Reliability
Enabling autonomous teams to deliver and operate reliably through CI/CD, testing, and clear operational ownership.

// Career Journey

Professional Experience

Independent Consultant

Berlin, Germany (EU-wide available)

Engineering Leader & AI-Assisted Developer

Technology Coach & Lead Engineer at Impact4Founders (from April 2026). Supporting early-stage founding teams with technology strategy, architecture decisions, and hands-on product development during the critical validation phase.

Working with founders and companies across Europe on technology leadership, architecture, and engineering organisation challenges. Building products for business contacts from my network, acting as a consultant and early-stage CTO supporter.

Hands-on in the codebase daily. Designing system architecture and data models, writing services and APIs, building frontend interfaces, and making build-vs-integrate decisions across the full stack. Using IntelliJ as primary IDE, with AI-assisted tooling (Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf Cascade) to accelerate implementation while keeping architectural coherence and code quality under human judgment.

  • Full-Stack Development
  • System Architecture
  • API Design
  • AI-Assisted Development
  • Fractional CTO
  • Technology Strategy
  • Organisational Design

FinCompare

Berlin, Germany

Head of Engineering

· Reporting to CEO/COO

Led the transformation of the technology organization, introducing modern operating models (Team Topologies, Domain-Driven Design, OKRs) and establishing a strong engineering culture focused on ownership and outcomes.

Built and led cross-functional teams across product engineering, platform, and cloud infrastructure, scaling the organization while improving delivery predictability, quality, and developer experience.

Drove the migration from a monolithic architecture toward domain-oriented, event-driven services and modern cloud-native platforms, while contributing to post-merger integration, platform unification, and the introduction of data-driven decision making via a central data warehouse.

  • Engineering Leadership
  • Technology Strategy
  • Organizational Design
  • Platform Engineering
  • Cloud Infrastructure
  • Event-Driven Architecture
  • Legacy Modernization
  • Team Topologies
  • DDD
  • OKRs
  • Cross-Functional Teams
  • Developer Experience
  • Fintech

smava

Berlin, Germany

Engineering Leadership (Engineering Manager → Director / Group Lead)

· Reporting to CTO

Led multiple cross-functional teams within the core domain (Banking & Matching), driving the introduction of Domain-Driven Design and enabling full domain ownership. Built and scaled engineering teams, modernized a complex monolithic platform into domain-oriented services, and ensured stable delivery in a highly regulated fintech environment.

Played a key role in post-merger integration, contributing to platform unification and cloud migration initiatives. Partnered closely with data science teams to integrate machine learning into products and customer flows.

  • Engineering Leadership
  • DDD
  • Microservices
  • Event-Driven Architecture
  • Platform Modernization
  • Legacy Modernization
  • Cloud Migration
  • Post-Merger Integration
  • Machine Learning Integration
  • Fintech
  • Cross-Functional Teams
  • Agile

Early Career – Software Engineering Foundations

Germany / Poland

Software Engineer | Multiple companies

Built strong foundations in backend engineering, distributed systems, and product development. Worked across different technology stacks and domains, gaining hands-on experience in designing, building, and operating production systems.

  • Full Stack Development
  • Backend Development
  • System Design
  • Databases
  • APIs
  • Testing
  • DevOps Basics

// Expertise

Skills & Technologies

Engineering Leadership & Organizational Design

  • Engineering Leadership
  • Transformational Leadership
  • Servant Leadership
  • Organizational Design
  • Scaling Engineering Teams
  • High-Performance Teams
  • Talent Development

AI-Assisted Development & Engineering with AI

  • AI-Assisted Development
  • Generative AI
  • LLM Integration
  • Agentic Architecture
  • AI Adoption Strategy
  • AI-Augmented Team Enablement
  • Machine Learning in Products
  • Data-Driven Decision Making

Technology & Platform Strategy

  • Technology Strategy
  • Platform Strategy
  • Platform Engineering
  • Architecture Vision
  • Technical Roadmapping
  • Build vs Buy Decisions
  • Developer Experience

Architecture & System Design

  • Domain-Driven Design
  • Event Storming
  • Microservices Architecture
  • Event-Driven Architecture
  • Distributed Systems
  • API Design
  • Legacy Modernization
  • Monolith to Microservices

Delivery, Execution & Metrics

  • OKRs
  • Agile
  • Scrum
  • Kanban
  • Outcome-Oriented Delivery
  • Lean Product Development
  • A/B Testing
  • Prototyping
  • MVP
  • CI/CD
  • DORA Metrics
  • SPACE Framework

Cloud, Reliability & Security

  • AWS
  • Cloud Migration
  • DevOps
  • Incident Management
  • Cloud Infrastructure
  • Observability
  • Reliability Engineering
  • Infrastructure as Code
  • ISO 27001
  • ISMS

// Insights

Latest Articles

March 2026

The Monolith We Did Not Fix

My first plan was the right one. That is what made it hard to abandon.

monolith migrationchange data captureCDC
March 2026

The Architecture Did Not Follow the Business

When I joined a fintech company as the engineer responsible for the Banking domain, I found a Java monolith with around forty engineers working on ...

monolith migrationmicroservicesstrangler pattern
View all articles

// Real-world Solutions

Case Studies

Organizational Design

Scaling Engineering Organizations for Sustainable Growth

A practical leadership blueprint for transforming fragmented delivery into autonomous, outcome-driven domains at scale.
View all case studies

// Get in Touch

Let's Build Something Great

I am open to permanent engineering leadership roles as well as fractional and interim engagements. The best way to start is a conversation. No pitch, no commitment.

Email
daniel@suszczynski.dev
→
LinkedIn
linkedin.com/in/suszczynski
→
GitHub
AI-Assisted Development Projects
→

Engineering Leader · Fractional CTO · Building with AI

Open to permanent, fractional, and interim engagements across Europe.

20 years in fintech and SaaS, from scaling organisations to 60+ engineers to shipping code with AI today. I bring both the strategic perspective and the practical experience.

Location: Berlin, Germany
Languages: English (fluent), German (working), Polish (native)