Tim Schmolka

[email protected]Berlin, DEtimschmolka.substack.com

Summary

Engineering Leader with 5+ years of technical leadership and 3+ years of people management experience across high-growth e-commerce platforms. Proven track record of scaling engineering teams, driving organizational transformation, and delivering complex technical systems. Expert in building distributed teams, fostering engineering excellence, and connecting technical strategy to business objectives.

Skills

Work Experience

Adevinta • Kleinanzeigen
Engineering Manager - Transactions
Mar 2023 — Present
  • Led engineering team of 9 engineers (from trainee to staff level) including a dedicated Tech Lead, establishing a scalable leadership model while delivering business-critical payment, shipping, and promotion systems
  • Directed business continuity and feature delivery during organizational and technological transformation, reporting to management team
  • Delivered key platform features to close functional gaps, including shipping integration overhaul and new payment providers
  • Established enhanced incident management processes, improving system reliability visibility and investment planning
  • Created and led Engineering Management Guild (~8 EMs), establishing mentoring program and engineering leveling framework
eBay Inc. • eBay Kleinanzeigen
Engineering Manager - Motors
Jul 2021 — Feb 2023
  • Designed and implemented C2B revenue stream connecting private sellers with dealers during industry supply shortage, diversifying revenue beyond mobile.de dealer offerings through data-driven A/B testing
  • Built and scaled team from ground up, promoting 2 engineers internally and establishing clear technical leadership pipeline with 100% retention rate
  • Implemented tailored agile framework focused on team strengths, resulting in one of the organization's most experimental and cross-functional teams
  • Established culture of accountability through OKR alignment and regular goal-setting, directly connecting team contributions to company objectives
  • Led and optimized company-wide engineering hiring process for high-volume scaling, implementing candidate experience SLOs and streamlined assessment funnel
  • Co-led successful global trainee program resulting in 15+ engineering hires across two cohorts, with 100% career changers and underrepresented talent
Senior Software Engineer
Jul 2020 — Jul 2021
  • Led major packaging and pricing initiative for PRO business, overseeing development of multiple commercial features
  • Architected and executed extraction of Motors domain from monolith, reducing deployment bottlenecks and enabling autonomous team setup
  • Shared technical leadership for B2C platform, driving architectural decisions and technical debt management
  • Facilitated platform-wide migration from Mesos/Marathon to Kubernetes through service migrations and developer enablement
  • Established technical assessment practices through interviews and coding challenge reviews
Software Engineer
Dec 2018 — Jun 2020
  • Established gRPC best practices across engineering org, improving service reliability during deployments through enhanced load balancing
  • Developed core B2C platform capabilities including visibility feature packages and cross-domain subscription management
  • Shared technical leadership for Motors and PRO domains from 2020, including stakeholder management and architectural decisions
  • Contributed to engineering onboarding processes and documentation, including creation of interactive onboarding experience
  • Operated distributed microservices in multi-datacenter setup
Mercury.ai
Backend Engineer
Apr 2018 — Jul 2019
  • Led development of bot building platform enabling rapid chatbot deployment for enterprise clients
  • Designed and implemented centralized logging platform for global monitoring
  • Established operational excellence on AWS platform: alerting, CI/CD, and dynamic scaling
  • Optimized development processes by introducing CI/CD, code review, and GitFlow practices
Empolis Information Management GmbH
Junior Solution Engineer
Jul 2017 — Mar 2018
  • Designed and developed enterprise search systems for patent search and public administration
  • Conducted systematic evaluations of search engines for specific use cases
  • Established DevOps practices including CI/CD pipelines and containerization
Apprentice IT Specialist - Application Development
Aug 2015 — Jun 2017
  • Reduced duration of the program from three years down to two years, due to exceptional performance
  • Contributed to enterprise search product development while learning core software engineering practices

Education

Cognitive Informatics • Bielefeld University, exmatriculated
B.S
Oct 2017 — Dec 2017
State-recognized IT Specialist • Application Development • Carl-Severing-Berufskolleg für Metall- und Elektrotechnik
Aug 2015 — Jun 2017

Awards & Recognitions