Case Study
Siemens EDA — Building the Engineering Org Behind a Global B2B SaaS Portal
Siemens EDA
Electronic Design Automation — a Siemens Digital Industries Software business
Role
Fractional Director of Engineering
Period
November 2023 – September 2025
Duration
22 months
Reporting Line
Worked alongside the permanent VP and Senior Manager
Industry
Electronic Design Automation
The Situation
Siemens EDA — the business unit behind industry-standard chip design tools — was launching a new B2B SaaS Customer Experience Portal to unify a sprawling collection of disparate systems that didn't talk to each other. Their existing tooling landscape was scattered and dysfunctional: customers and internal teams were navigating multiple disconnected applications to do work that should have been seamless.
The permanent leadership — a VP and a Senior Manager — knew what needed to happen. What they needed was senior architectural depth embedded alongside them from day one, so the platform would be built correctly the first time. Discovering gaps in production wasn't an option.
Why a Fractional Executive
Siemens EDA's leaders weren't trying to fill a vacant role. They needed a senior architectural and engineering leader embedded alongside them to make sure the portal was built correctly the first time — credible at the architecture level, hands-on enough to build the team, and willing to mentor permanent leadership rather than create dependency.
What I Led
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Built the engineering organization from scratch. Hired and led a 28-person team across frontend (React/Next.js), backend (NestJS), DevOps, QA, and PM — defining roles, rituals, and quality gates from day one.
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Built the entire AWS footprint from zero. No AWS accounts existed when I arrived. Designed the multi-account strategy, VPC topology, network segmentation, and multi-AZ deployment patterns. Established Terraform as the IaC standard with reusable module structure across all environments.
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Owned the platform architecture. 15 interconnected microservices on ECS Fargate, AppSync GraphQL API layer, RDS Aurora and DocumentDB polyglot persistence, EventBridge / Step Functions / Lambda for serverless workflows.
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Established DevSecOps as a default, not a stage gate. GitHub Actions CI/CD with blue-green deployments, integrated Vitest / Playwright / SonarQube / Tenable / Aqua quality gates, observability via CloudWatch and OpenSearch.
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Mentored the permanent VP and Senior Manager on cloud-native architecture decisions and AWS service selection — equipping them to sustain the platform without me.
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Introduced AI coding assistants (Claude) into the development workflow, accelerating TypeScript and CDK velocity.
Business Outcomes
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99.99% uptime on the mission-critical Customer Experience Portal
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75% faster deployment cycles through CI/CD and quality gate automation
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30% infrastructure cost reduction through architecture discipline and FinOps
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60% improvement in code quality through standards, reviews, and automated gates
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40% acceleration in feature delivery velocity via reusable component library
What I Left Behind
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A self-sufficient 28-person engineering organization with documented standards
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A complete production-ready AWS footprint, fully managed via Terraform
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15 microservices in production with established observability and incident response
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Permanent leadership equipped to evolve the platform without me