Founder-Minded Software Engineer

Niklas Friedrich Gerstner

I build digital products that stay clear under pressure and hold up in real operation.

I work where product judgment, technical depth, and execution speed need to reinforce each other. At EVEX Group, I help shape a new healthtech environment. Before that, I built Krymo Software into a global product business and delivered customer-facing product work at scale at CHECK24.

Munich, Bavaria, Germany

Software Engineer at EVEX Group

500+

Customers Served

Built through Krymo Software as an independent product business.

30+

Products Shipped

Across owned products, plugins, and client-specific delivery.

10k+

Monthly Active Users

Across products where reliability matters after launch.

6M+

Users Reached

On high-visibility CHECK24 product surfaces under live traffic.

Experience

01 // Selected Work

September 2025 - Present

EVEX Group

Software Engineer

EVEX Innovation Hub

Working inside a newly established healthtech environment within a private-equity-backed group, where product clarity, fast iteration, and pragmatic technical decisions matter from day one.

Own the product surface for a greenfield initiative and turn early requirements into a delivery structure the team can scale with.
Introduce and refine AI-supported workflows where they create leverage instead of process theater.
Operate across implementation quality, delivery pragmatism, and early product shaping.

November 2019 - December 2025

Krymo Software

Founder & Software Engineer

Independent software company

Legacy Site

Built and ran a software business end to end, spanning product strategy, engineering, support, sales, and operational maintenance.

Shipped a broad product portfolio for real production use, from launch through maintenance and customer support.
Scaled the business to more than 500 customers worldwide and expanded the portfolio through selective acquisitions.
Exited the majority of the portfolio through two asset deals in late 2025.

September 2021 - December 2024

CHECK24 Group

Software Engineer across customer journeys and special projects

Customer-facing product work across payments, after-sales, rental car, and high-visibility special projects

I worked across several product areas at CHECK24, contributing where customer-facing workflows, delivery pressure, and operational reliability had to come together.

Planned and implemented customer-facing workflows in payments and after-sales with a strong focus on clarity, maintainability, and operational usefulness.
Improved the CHECK24 rental-car product foundation by removing brittle dependencies and making the codebase easier to evolve toward an international platform context.
Built trust through consistent product delivery and quality work, including a Top 30 placement in the company-wide UX and bug-improvement league.

May 2024 - July 2024

6M+ Users

UEFA Euro 2024 Prediction Game

Supported a high-visibility CHECK24 launch under peak traffic, contributing to interactive user-facing features and fast issue resolution in a live environment.

Role Progression

June 2024 - December 2024

Professional Software Developer

AurumCars (a CHECK24 company)

Rebuilt the local frontend setup to speed up iteration and remove unstable remote-server dependencies.
Helped move the CHECK24 rental-car product into a cleaner, more forkable state for AurumCars and the build-out of the international platform PlanetRentalcars.com.

August 2023 - May 2024

Professional Software Developer

CHECK24 Car Parts

Planned and delivered a new self-service portal for returns, cancellations, and complaints, reducing support workload by enabling customers to handle those workflows directly.
Brought accessibility thinking into day-to-day product decisions and workflow design, informed by my bachelor thesis on accessible development processes.

September 2021 - July 2023

Intern to Working Student, Software Engineering

CHECK24 Shopping Services & Car Parts

Led the design and implementation of a backend interface for a fully native payment experience in the CHECK24 app.
Helped improve mobile payment selection flows and supported the surrounding operational quality work.

Impact

02 // What I Optimize For

Founder Ownership

Connect engineering work to business consequence

I work best when product, engineering, and commercial consequence are treated as one problem instead of three separate conversations.

Comfortable making scope decisions when speed, quality, and commercial value pull in different directions.
Used to carrying responsibility from product definition through support, maintenance, and eventual exit.
Prefer environments where ownership does not stop at implementation.

Delivery Under Pressure

Stay clear when requirements move and stakes are real

I am most useful when a team has real user consequences, changing requirements, and no room for vague execution.

Strong at turning vague requirements into workflows people can actually understand and use.
Comfortable moving between greenfield work, modernization, and high-visibility launches.
Reliable in product environments where operational pressure and customer impact are both real.

Operational Pragmatism

Optimize for durability, not just launch momentum

I care about what happens after launch: how a product is run, how quickly a team can iterate, and how much avoidable friction compounds over time.

Push for delivery setups that make iteration faster and remove avoidable dependency chains.
Prefer systems that stay understandable as product needs evolve.
Think about maintenance, support, and operational reality early, not as cleanup later.

Approach

03 // How I Work

Product-Facing Execution

I turn ambiguous requirements into product work that is coherent, shippable, and understandable for real users.

Comfortable owning a user-facing surface instead of just contributing isolated tickets.
Care about clarity in flows, not just implementation completeness.
Operate well in greenfield work as well as modernization contexts.

Systems & Operations

I work best on products where workflows, business logic, and operational reality need to fit together cleanly.

Strong on workflow-heavy systems where edge cases matter.
Comfortable defining boundaries, sequencing, failure handling, and operational tradeoffs.
Push for delivery setups that improve iteration speed and reduce hidden fragility.
Think in terms of maintainable systems, not isolated features or one-off launches.

Decision Framing

I help frame scope, sequencing, and tradeoffs in a way that keeps teams moving without losing sight of product reality.

Comfortable making scope decisions instead of only receiving them.
Used to balancing product ambition with operational constraints and delivery pressure.
Work well across technical and non-technical stakeholders when decisions need to stay grounded.

Education

04 // Formal Background

Higher Education

B.Sc. in Computer Science and Media, Stuttgart Media University.
Bachelor thesis on an accessibility-focused development process for web applications built in Scrum settings.

Business & Entrepreneurship

Early academic focus on business informatics, business administration, accounting, and control.
Expanded that foundation during university through imported modules in internal and external accounting.
Completed ADVANCE, the entrepreneurship program of the HdM Startup Center, covering customer discovery, validation, business modeling, finance, sales, growth, and pitching.

ADVANCE Certificate

Teaching

Tutor for Software Development 1 and 2, supporting more than 100 students in recurring technical sessions.
Taught software development at a secondary school for three months using self-developed teaching materials.

Projects

05 // Selected Projects

Campus-wide rollout

View Project

HoRST 3D

Rebuilt HoRST 3D for Hochschule der Medien Stuttgart as a campus navigation PWA with an interactive 3D model, offline support, kiosk deployment, and hundreds of daily users after the full rollout.

Relaunched the product from scratch in 2023 together with two students to improve performance, stability, maintainability, and documentation across mobile, desktop, and kiosk use cases.
Designed the product around practical campus orientation, including buildings, rooms, and facilities inside an interactive 3D model with offline support.
HoRST 3D was selected for a special MediaNight presentation to university leadership and international guests before replacing the legacy system campus-wide.

Isometric black-and-white style overview of the HoRST 3D campus model

Self-Service Server Products

Built Sparkane, a fully automated browser-based platform for launching private Minecraft challenge servers for players with no manual setup, provisioning more than 8,000 servers per month.
Built setupmc.com, which supports more than 1,800 active Minecraft server administrators monthly with a real-time Docker Compose configurator and paid backup guidance.
Focused on removing setup and operations friction while keeping the products scalable and cost-efficient in production.

Platform Localization

Managed translations for fnbr.co, an independent Fortnite item directory with more than 3.6 million monthly users, coordinating community submissions and maintaining the German version.
Contributed German translations for Twitter, Periscope, and the Vine archive, recognized for translation quality in 2017.

Community Leadership

Led product and operations for a multiplayer platform with up to 800 concurrent users and more than 300,000 total users within roughly 18 months.
Worked across engineering, administration, recruiting, and international moderation teams in an environment with constant live-service demands.
Handled partner management with content creators and supported the project through social media and growth-facing work.

Get in Touch

Open to conversations about product engineering, ownership-heavy roles, and early-stage or high-pressure product environments.

Primary Contact

business@niklas.id