October 2021 — December 2024: Cloud Architect at Union Investment
Freelance | Remote
Role & Contributions:
- Led IT Landscape Modernization for a leading German asset management company, focusing on their central B2B sales platform.
- Managed teams of 5-7 developers, serving as technical Product Owner and agile coach.
- Designed and implemented a microfrontend framework, enabling distributed development and team autonomy.
- Architected a centralized search solution consuming event streams from distributed Self-contained Systems.
- Established comprehensive DevOps practices, including Pipeline-as-Code and Infrastructure-as-Code.
Business Impact:
- Reduced deployment time from several days to 30 minutes for urgent changes.
- Achieved 99.9% uptime throughout production operation.
- Implemented sub-second search response times across all domain boundaries.
- Enabled autonomous team development with 10x faster deployment cycles.
- Established architecture patterns adopted as a template for group-wide modernization initiatives.
Team Performance & 360° Feedback:
Based on comprehensive 360-degree feedback surveys (December 2021, June 2022, November 2024):
- Technical Competence: Consistently rated 9-10/10 by team members and stakeholders in 2024
- Collaboration: High ratings for pleasant working relationship, averaging 8.6/10 in 2024
- Leadership: Strong ratings for driving topics forward (9/10 in 2024)
Client Testimonials:
“Markus Schulte has in his multi-year engagement in the web portals domain successfully deployed his outstanding technical expertise and pronounced communicative talent across multiple teams as an architect. His work approach was consistently characterized by professionalism, reliability, and high quality.”
— Senior Colleague, Union Investment (2024)
“His structured approach and ability to analyze complex architectures, share knowledge with the team, and develop them to the ‘next level’ have greatly advanced the entire project. His ability to convince and inspire colleagues about the opportunities and advantages of technical solutions was decisive in setting common goals and achieving them as planned.”
— Team Member, Union Investment (2024)
“Great that you were also easy to reach through informal channels. Thank you for your support.”
— Project Stakeholder, Union Investment (2024)
Key Technologies: Azure (Static Web App, Functions, Event Hubs, AD B2C), JavaScript/TypeScript, Node.js, Java, Lit framework, Self-contained Systems (SCS), Microfrontends, Microservices, Event-driven Architecture, Algolia, Nx, Lerna, Terraform, Docker, SonarQube, Jest, Playwright.