01
Industrial AI software factory
Built a multi-stage software factory for Tesla Automation that turns Jira tickets into tested, reviewed pull requests and per-feature test deployments; development time cut to about one-third.
Szomraky Consulting
Stefan Szomraky
AI Engineering Lead · Industrial & Cloud Software Senior & Lead Developer · Technical Consultant · Team Lead
.NET / C# · Java · Cloud, Hybrid & On-Premise · Industrial IoT
Available for freelance client engagements
Profile
Independent architect, consultant and team lead
More than 20 years of professional software engineering, from factory floors to global enterprise platforms.
Independent software architect, technical consultant and team lead with more than 20 years of professional experience in .NET / C# and Java, cloud, hybrid and on-premise systems, and Industrial IoT. I help clients design, build and lead software that has to work in production: from IoT edge devices in factories to global enterprise platforms.
My current focus is AI engineering and automation. I design agentic, multi-model development pipelines and AI integrations that measurably accelerate delivery in real engineering teams, while keeping humans in control of what gets integrated.
I work equally well as an architect and consultant, as a team lead, or as a hands-on lead developer. Quality-first by conviction (TDD / ATDD, automated testing, monitoring).
“Document, create integration tests and monitoring, and sleep better!”
Availability
What I can do for you
Contract or project basis, on-site in Berlin or Barcelona, or remote.
- AI engineering lead & automation
- Team leadership
- Industrial & cloud software: lead / senior .NET / C# development
- Technical consulting
- Software & cloud architecture
- Industrial IoT & edge systems
- Cloud, hybrid & on-premise systems
Focus points
Where I make the difference
02
AI team leadership
Lead the MOCS AI team for Tesla Automation as an external freelance consultant; adoption of the software factory is expanding into more branches and teams.
03
Enterprise AI integration
AI document analysis for hundreds of invoices and order confirmations per day; MCP servers that let employee-facing AI agents answer questions about company data.
04
.NET / C# lead development and architecture
15+ years of C# / .NET; currently lead developer and architect of Tesla Automation’s worldwide resource-planning software (ASP.NET, Entity Framework Core, SQL Server, Kubernetes).
05
Industrial IoT at scale
Largely designed a greenfield Azure Industrial IoT platform (IoT Edge, OPC UA, umati) for thousands of connected machines; later added on-premise variants for high-security customers.
06
Long-term client trust
Engagements extended well beyond their initial scope, e.g. from 3 months to about 1.5 years (IconMobile / Procter & Gamble) and from one module to a complete framework (Bundesdruckerei).
Project experience (freelance)
Client engagements
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12/2024 – present
Tesla Automation / Tesla Motors
Team Lead / Lead Software Developer / AI Project Lead
Tesla Automation, a division of Tesla, Inc., builds automation and production systems for Tesla’s global manufacturing. I support Tesla Automation as an external freelance consultant in two parallel roles.
MOCS AI Team Lead
Lead the MOCS AI team, setting technical direction and delivering AI engineering and automation solutions.
- Automated AI software factory (major achievement). Designed and built a multi-stage pipeline that processes Jira tickets end to end: it refines requirements, asks users clarifying questions, implements the change, creates and runs unit tests, audits the code, refactors newly generated code, checks architectural conformance, opens Git pull requests and creates per-feature deployments for user testing.
- Human in the loop. Users interact with the factory throughout the process, and every change requires human verification before it is integrated.
- Engineering. Supports multiple models and multiple AI vendors; runs each job in an isolated Docker container; optimizes caching.
- Self-improving workflow. Analyzes recurring code flows, learns from previous execution outcomes and suggests improvements to its own workflow.
- AI document analysis. Automated the processing of hundreds of incoming invoices and order confirmations per day.
- MCP servers for AI agents. Created Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers that allow employee-facing AI agents to answer questions about company data.
≈ ⅓Measured result. Typical development time reduced to approximately one-third, measured against developers who were already using Claude or Grok locally. Adoption is expanding into more branches and teams.
Lead Developer & Architect (incl. DevOps) – Worldwide Resource Planning
In parallel: technical lead and architect of the web application used to plan and manage personnel worldwide, so that the right skill sets are deployed to the right projects at the right time.
- Lead the architectural evolution of the application: global visualization and planning of employee activities with real-time updates and forecasting across time zones and departments.
- Introduced acceptance test-driven development (ATDD) and overhauled the testing and infrastructure setup; introduced CI/CD best practices, improving development speed and test coverage.
- Improved the Entity Framework Core data access layer for maintainability and performance.
- Mentor developers and align vision and delivery with stakeholders across teams.
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06/2022 – 10/2024
Cloud Solutions Architect / Consultant / Senior Software Developer
Georg Fischer Machining Solutions SA (GF Machining Solutions)
Division of the Swiss industrial group Georg Fischer; leading provider of precision machining and automation solutions (milling, EDM, laser texturing, additive manufacturing) for aerospace, automotive, medical and ICT.
- Machine Monitor: real-time visibility of machine parks: job status, KPI graphs, machine messages and statistical analysis of machine events.
- Sustainability Dashboard: GF’s implementation of machine efficiency evaluation per ISO 14955 / VDMA 34179. Correlates power-sensor data (electricity, compressed air) with machine states and jobs for per-job energy breakdowns; processes hundreds of samples per second and retains them for years (e.g. showing double-digit percentage savings after a filter cleaning).
- Designed microservices that process large data volumes from thousands of machines without vertical scaling.
- Cloud and on-premise: built abstraction layers (CosmosDB / MongoDB, Event Hub / RabbitMQ, Azure Data Explorer / InfluxDB) so that high-security aerospace customers can run the portal applications on-premise.
- Moved infrastructure to fully automated Terraform management; introduced SpecFlow testing; responsible for DevOps operations; Linux system engineering and consulting for cloud and on-premise environments.
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12/2020 – 06/2022
Cloud Solutions Architect / Consultant / Senior Software Developer
Symmedia GmbH (Georg Fischer group)
Greenfield cloud successor to symmedia SP/1, the “Internet of machines” used in over 100 countries for remote service, parts, maintenance and monitoring. Scale at start: several thousand IoT edge devices in connected factories, gigabytes of data per machine for predictive maintenance and quality prediction.
- Together with client and parent-company experts, consulted on and largely designed the cloud and IoT edge infrastructure and most backend services.
- Owned the data path from factory and edge devices through hot and cold paths into Azure Data Explorer and CosmosDB, exposed via federated GraphQL services.
- Designed and built the Azure Industrial IoT edge solution: marketplace for third-party data acquisition and processing apps running shielded on edge devices, deployment, monitoring, reporting, and OPC UA data acquisition.
- Evaluated industrial protocols including umati / OPC UA Machinery, with VDMA and Microsoft. Worked with Microsoft’s Azure IoT Edge and Industrial IoT teams on fixes and features; handled public bug reporting (Microsoft IoT, Industrial IoT and Azure Java SDK repositories, Terraform).
- Introduced ATDD with Cucumber and end-to-end integration testing in CI/CD; member of the core QA team. Hybrid Java / .NET code base on Kubernetes, managed with ArgoCD and Terraform.
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09/2020 – 10/2020
Cloud Solutions Consultant
DHL
- Consulted on the cloud architecture and the .NET microservice framework of a global IoT solution tracking shipments and roll cages; supported cost optimization.
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09/2019 – 06/2020
Software Developer / Team Lead
Mister Spex
- Built a stock and reservation tracking microservice (availability, delivery times) for Europe’s largest online optician, with full CI/CD, full API specification test coverage, auto-scaling and nightly benchmarks.
- Designed an event-based integration architecture (Event Grid, Service Bus), a microservice template and a “rule book” for connecting services; trained on-site developers in .NET Core and ATDD.
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05/2019 – 07/2019
Software Developer
eatat System AG / Aveato
- Helped a business caterer meet a critical deadline for migrating its high-availability platform to Azure and microservices; backend development, cloud knowledge transfer and Scrum process improvements.
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11/2018 – 03/2019
Technical Consultant
Berlin-based start-up (under NDA)
- Low-latency video streaming, processing and storage, video teleconferencing and payment systems.
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05/2017 – 10/2018
Developer and Technical Project Manager (Backend)
IconMobile, for Procter & Gamble (Oral-B)
- Hired to resolve performance problems in the backend of a connected-toothbrush app; rewrote it for testability, scalability and monitoring, added brushing analytics, and took over the backend TPM role.
- Made the backend GDPR compliant, migrated it to Azure and documented it fully; acted as neutral mediator between P&G’s many service providers. Contract extended from 3 months to about 1.5 years.
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09/2016 – 02/2017
Lead Developer
Bundesdruckerei (German Federal Printing Office)
- Replaced an ASP.NET 1.1 platform for high-security product life-cycle management: new framework (MVC, Entity Framework 6, Angular 2, TypeScript), rights management and provisioning, central OAuth2 single sign-on, UI redesign, and staff training.
- Specified legacy behavior as Gherkin acceptance tests signed off by the client; introduced Scrum with Jira. Scope grew from one module to the complete framework.
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09/2014 – 07/2016
Lead Developer (team of 5) – Loan Quality Assessment (LQA v3)
Rabobank International, Risk and Finance IT
- Architecture, UI / UX and development of a greenfield ASP.NET MVC 5 single-page application used around the clock worldwide, including locations with poor connectivity; replaced fragile Word-based reporting with structured data entry, in-browser rich text editing and server-side PDF generation. Concepts adopted as department standards.
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06/2013 – 09/2014
Lead Developer (team of 2) – Compliance Application (CAFE)
Rabobank International, Risk and Finance IT
- Compliance system for 45,000 employees (EBA and Rabobank rules, monitoring of employee stock trading) at the bank’s highest security level: immutable, auditable data and prevention of concurrent edits. Introduced document storage and TypeScript to the department.
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03/2012 – 04/2014
CTO / Co-founder
7pressplay.com (7 VOF)
- Technical architecture and most of the development of a dance-video platform: ASP.NET MVC, Umbraco, MongoDB, Solr; video delivery on Linux / Lighttpd; custom upload and transcoding pipeline (.NET, Linux, Amazon EC2 / S3, FFmpeg).
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10/2012 – 03/2013
Performance Consultant
113online.nl, Amsterdam
- Load testing and optimization of the Drupal portal of the Dutch suicide prevention hotline for sudden peaks of up to 100,000 visitors per hour; set up Git / Gitolite source control.
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08/2012 – 12/2012
Software Developer
Vtality B.V., Utrecht
- Re-architecture of the BLOXS business software product (ASP.NET MVC, Knockout, SQL Server); hour registration module and back-office interface for a client with 7,000 employees; TFS-based development process.
Project experience (employee)
Before going independent
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10/2010 – 03/2012
Senior Software Developer, Innovation / R&D
NetMatch / NetAssist B.V., Amsterdam
Prototypes, proofs of concept and feasibility studies for travel-industry clients (e.g. TUI, Hapag, Corendon, Zoover): social media integration, natural language text analysis, cloud computing (Windows Azure), .NET 4, WCF, WF, SQL Server.
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09/2008 – 09/2010
IT Department Manager / Software Architect
Hotelplan Management AG, Zürich
Managed the Customer and Platform Solutions department of Switzerland’s second-largest tour operator; led pan-European projects with subsidiaries in the UK and Italy, including relaunches of the major brands’ booking sites and consolidation onto central platforms; architect and technical advisor across projects.
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10/2005 – 08/2008
Software Developer / Software Architect
Lexware GmbH & Co. KG, Freiburg
Core architecture team of Germany’s leading small-business finance software publisher: introduced aspect-oriented programming (PostSharp) and IoC / DI (Castle MicroKernel extensions); C++ / Java / C# interoperability; managed external development partners in Belarus, Croatia and Romania; code reviews and coding guidelines.
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08/2002 – 10/2005
Software Developer / Administrator
!zip EDV-Beratungs GmbH, Neustadt
Industrial automation software: ported the Siemens WinCC (SCADA) data manager from C++ to C# / Managed C++; QA product !zipTest&Doc in C#; process control systems for Kolbenschmidt; remote-maintenance network for Stadtwerke Gießen.
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06/1998 – 07/2002
Software Developer (internships and part-time)
AIK Electronics Austria, Klagenfurt
CAD/CAM support software and system administration (Solaris, VAX, Linux) at a PCB manufacturer; Linux-routed ISDN interconnect of plants in Austria, the UK and Hungary; Java simulation of CNC drilling programs.
Skills
Technology and expertise
AI engineering & automation (current focus)
Leadership & consulting
Architecture
Cloud & DevOps
Industrial IoT
Programming languages
Frameworks & web
Data, messaging & search
Quality & methods
Platforms
Industries
Skill level overview
| Skill | Level | Experience |
|---|---|---|
| C# / .NET, .NET Core | Expert | 15+ years · current |
| AI engineering, agentic development, MCP | Experienced | current |
| Software architecture | Experienced | 8+ years · current |
| Cloud computing (Azure, AWS, Google Cloud) | Experienced | 10+ years |
| ASP.NET, MVC, ASP.NET Core | Experienced | 13 years · current |
| Microsoft SQL Server | Experienced | 10 years · current |
| Test-driven development (TDD, ATDD), Cucumber, SpecFlow | Experienced | 8 years · current |
| Unix / Linux development | Very experienced | 15+ years |
| Windows development | Very experienced | 15+ years |
| IoT, IoT Edge, Industrial IoT, Azure IoT | Experienced | 3+ years |
| Event Grid, Event Hub, Service Bus | Experienced | 5 years |
| Java (pure and Spring) | Experienced | 4 years |
| Azure CosmosDB, MongoDB, NoSQL | Experienced | 3–4 years |
| Azure Data Explorer (Kusto) | Experienced | 2 years |
| GraphQL, GraphQL Federation | Experienced | 2 years |
| REST, web services, RPC, SOAP | Experienced | 5 years |
| Kubernetes, ArgoCD, Terraform | Experienced | 2+ years · current |
| OPC UA, umati | Working knowledge | 2 years |
| ADO.NET, LINQ, Entity Framework | Experienced | 7 years · current |
| JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML5, CSS | Experienced | 7–8 years |
| C / C++ / Managed C++ | Experienced | 5 years |
| MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite | Experienced | 2 years |
About me
Education, languages and more
Born in 1983 in Klagenfurt, Austria.
Education
Diploma in Technical Computer Science (Internet Engineering and Telecommunication)
HTL-HIT, Klagenfurt, Austria · 1997 – 06/2002
Higher technical college (HTL) with an engineering focus. Graduation project: user-searchable process-data archive for Bayer, interfacing with the SCADA systems controlling the factory processes.
Languages
- German
- native
- English
- fluent (daily business use)
- Dutch
- fluent (daily business use)
- Spanish
- A2 level (learning)
Private projects & interests
Home automation from custom hardware to openHAB and touch panels · Wi-Fi messaging device on Arduino and Azure IoT (MQTT) with companion web app · own small operating systems for i386 (16 / 32 bit) · Simple IPX Bridge (IPX over TCP/UDP, GPL) · communication libraries for .NET (e.g. ICQ.NET) · PIC microcontroller projects.
Interests: Sports, yoga, motorbikes (KTM), travel, languages, art and photography, electronics tinkering.
Contact
Let’s talk about your project.
Available for freelance client engagements on a contract / project basis. References are available on request.
- Emailmail@stsz.de
- Phone+49 30 23605557
- LocationBerlin, Germany · Barcelona, Spain · Remote
- Curriculum vitaeDownload CV (PDF)