Products used by teams in 40+ countries every single day.
By day, Head of Product Engineering at an international SaaS. In between, I take on a handful of select projects — from architecture through to rollout. The stack follows the requirements, not the other way around.
On the web since 2000. Engineer, product lead, plugin author.
I built my first website when I was 14 — that's over 25 years ago now. In between came time at Hapag Lloyd, seven years as CTO at Frischepost (where I built a complete e-commerce platform from the ground up — shop, warehouse, delivery-slot system, deposit app, PIM), and today Head of Product Engineering at an international SaaS in Maastricht with customers in over 40 countries. In parallel, torben.me as my freelance brand since 2013 — plus mc4sw, my Shopware plugins, in production since 2018.
What I've learned in those years: software isn't done when it ships. It's done when the support tickets stop coming in. That's why I don't think in tickets, I think in outcomes. Laravel and Vue/Nuxt are home territory — but the stack always follows the problem, not the other way around.
- Role
- Head of Product Eng.
- Based
- Hamburg, DE
- Toolbox
- Laravel · Vue · AI
- Since
- 2000
- Product
- mc4sw.de
Where I've been.
-
2023 — now
Head of Product Engineering
International SaaS · Maastricht, NL -
2015 — 2022
CTO
Frischepost · 7 years · e-commerce platform from the ground up -
2009 — 2015
Manager / IT Systems Analyst
Hapag Lloyd AG · 6+ years -
2013 — now
IT Consultant & Full Stack Developer
torben.me · freelance, continuous
What I can do for you.
-
01
Web & app development
From first prototype to production-ready release. Pragmatic stack choice, clean architecture, and code that still gets maintained long after launch. No throw-away codebases. -
02
Product engineering
Technical roadmap, architecture calls, prioritisation. For teams without a CTO or founders who need a sparring partner. -
03
AI integration
Claude, OpenAI and open-source models integrated into existing applications. With prompt caching, cost control and fallbacks for when the model hallucinates. -
04
Consulting & architecture
A second opinion on your code, your architecture or a due diligence before an acquisition. Written, with concrete recommendations. -
05
CMS solutions
WordPress when pragmatism wins, Statamic when you want flat-file and version-controlled. Including migrations away from bloated setups.
Mailchimp ↔ Shopware
In production since 2018.
Under the mc4sw brand I build and sell plugins that connect Shopware shops with Mailchimp — from customer and order sync all the way to e-commerce tracking and automations. Deployed in shops across the DACH region and beyond.
- F.01 Native Shopware 6 integration, actively maintained
- F.02 Customer, order and product data in real-time sync
- F.03 E-commerce tracking without external snippets
Got a project in mind?
Tell me in three sentences what you're building — I'll get back to you within 48 hours with an honest assessment of whether and how I can help.
hello@torben.me →