Alexander Wagner
14 Years Engineering
10 Years Leading Teams

Engineering Leader for Remote-First Teams in the AI Era

Fourteen years building software, ten leading distributed teams — hands-on with Go, org design and agentic AI.

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About

I'm a software engineer and technical leader — fourteen years building software, ten of them leading engineering teams across cybersecurity, health tech and enterprise data.

As a German living in Denmark, my expat journey has shaped how I think about cross-cultural collaboration and remote team dynamics — and taught me the value of diverse viewpoints and inclusive environments where good ideas can come from anywhere.

I've worked remote-first since 2014 and believe in it more than ever in the AI era. When AI tooling measurably accelerates how teams deliver, the limiting factor isn't where people sit — it's whether they deeply understand the mission and are genuinely committed to the outcomes.

My leadership philosophy centers on ownership, continuous learning, and decisions that balance innovation with practical delivery. Great technology emerges where technical excellence meets human understanding.

Alexander Wagner

Remote-First Leader

Leading distributed teams — remote-first since 2014

Mission-Driven

Focus on team commitment and deep understanding of purpose

Cross-Cultural

German expat in Denmark leading globally distributed teams

My Approach

Strategic thinking paired with hands-on engineering — grounded in what actually works for distributed teams.

Collaborative Decision Making

Data-driven decisions through open discussion with all stakeholders. Technical choices emerge from transparent dialogue between engineering, product and business — alignment without lowering the bar.

AI-Conscious Innovation

Structured experimentation with a clear-eyed view of AI: having led an org-wide shift to agentic engineering, I care as much about where AI shouldn't decide as where it should.

Remote-First Empowerment

Autonomous distributed teams built on transparent, honest and clear communication. Remote works when shared understanding and genuine commitment are created deliberately — not assumed.

Technical Excellence

High standards through code review, architecture discussions and continuous learning. Technical debt is a strategic choice, not an inevitability.

Experience

Fourteen years of building software, ten of them leading engineering teams — remote-first, across cybersecurity, health tech and enterprise data.

Head of Engineering

Abusix GmbH Oct 2021 – Present

Leading the engineering organization of a cybersecurity company, reporting directly to the CEO. Drove the org-wide shift to agentic AI engineering: ~90% Claude Code adoption on an AI policy I authored, lifting PR throughput ~75% on a DORA baseline I stood up — with change-failure rate back at baseline within two months.

  • Built the engineering org from 4 to a peak of 21 across four teams, then deliberately consolidated it over three org-design cycles into a focused, AI-accelerated team of 9.
  • Hired 14 engineers and sponsored 8 promotions; introduced a Goal-Owner accountability model that is now standard across the company.
  • Stayed hands-on: architected and co-implemented a data-pipeline migration handling 25M+ events/day, moving the stack to Go; launched the Abusix Intel product from conception to market.

Freelance Backend Engineer

Self-employed, remote Aug 2019 – Sep 2021

External architecture advisor and hands-on engineer for five clients across five domains — scoping legacy rescues and greenfield MVPs, then delivering them. A real-time ad server built from scratch in Go in 2021 is still in production and under active development 4+ years later.

  • streamMonkey GmbH — feature development for streaming products in Go on a microservices architecture.
  • V10K GmbH — architecture and best-practices consulting alongside hands-on implementation and testing.
  • EnBW Energie Baden-Württemberg AG — development in the EnPowerX project in the energy sector.
  • Telepaxx Medical Data — led a small delivery team on a medical-imaging legacy migration.

Head of Development

PIO Security GmbH / patronus.io Oct 2016 – Jul 2019

Built the engineering team of a Berlin security startup from zero to six — with every hire staying for the full three years. Without a dedicated product function, brought three security and compliance product lines from concept to market — making previously enterprise-only web security available to the SMB market.

Senior Engineering Roles

GRAU DATA AG · medneo GmbH · agorum Software GmbH Jun 2012 – Aug 2016

Co-architected the DataSpace cloud file-storage product family, stabilized and took over the backend of a teleradiology "Radiology-as-a-Service" platform, and built a fully automated CI/CD pipeline in 2015 — pre-Docker, pre-GitHub-Actions.

Technical Leadership Stack

Leading teams with expertise across Golang, JavaScript/TypeScript, and Java ecosystems, specializing in microservices architecture and cloud-native solutions.

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Contact

Always happy to talk shop — remote-first teams, AI-augmented engineering, or an interesting problem you're wrestling with. My inbox is open.

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