Simon Schrottner
I help engineering organizations ship with confidence, from the leadership room to the flag in production.
Independent, and currently taking on new engagements.
Most of my career has gone into the unglamorous parts of shipping software: build systems, CI/CD, developer platforms, feature flags. Long enough to learn that a slow release cycle usually comes from an organization that hasn’t agreed on what it’s building, not from the tooling.
Most of what I do is advisory: workshops, reviews, and sessions where the point is a senior answer rather than an extra pair of hands. Some of it is embedded, running engineering part-time for companies that need the seniority without the headcount. Based in Pernegg an der Mur, Austria, working remotely and on site wherever the work is.
Two ways to work with me
Advisory and workshops
Time-boxed work where the value is the expertise rather than the hours. Feature flagging and OpenFeature from one of the standard's maintainers, and spec sessions for teams working out how engineering holds together once agents write the code.
For: teams who need a senior outside answer to a specific question, and platform or DevEx groups who want depth without another full-time hire.
Fractional engineering leadership
Head of Engineering or CTO at a fraction of a full-time hire, for companies with their first one or two engineering teams. Technical direction, hiring and growing the team, and turning delivery into something the rest of the business can plan around.
For: founders who've outgrown running engineering themselves, and companies in the gap between two engineering leaders.
What engagements look like, and how they start →
Where this comes from
- OpenFeature maintainer and technical steering committee member. The CNCF’s vendor-neutral standard for feature flagging, active across Java, Go, Python, and JavaScript.
- CNCF Ambassador. Working between cloud-native projects and the teams trying to adopt them.
- AAIF Ambassador. First cohort at the Agentic AI Foundation, the open home for the agentic AI stack.
- Team captain at Dynatrace. Around eight engineers. Hiring, growth conversations, and the case for each promotion.
- Feature flags at scale. Architected a centralized feature flag management service across all Dynatrace clusters and stages, and wired it into OpenTelemetry.
- NETCONOMY. Almost a decade in the Java toolchain: Gradle, SonarQube, CI/CD, and the plumbing that decides whether a team ships.
- Founder. Ran my own software company for three years, building GPS tooling for waste-collection fleets.
- Togtrama. Founder and chair of a community club in Frohnleiten that runs on volunteer enthusiasm alone.
Left of the Loop
AI is stripping out the incidental friction that used to produce shared understanding as a byproduct of building software. That makes shared understanding the scarce resource, and pushes engineering work left, toward defining what a system should do before anything gets built.
Left of the Loop is where I’m working that out in public, and it’s the operating model I bring to the leadership work. The series is the fastest way to see how I think, and a spec session is the fastest way to try it on a real piece of work.
Speaking
Conferences, meetups, and internal engineering events, in English or German, delivered from inside the projects rather than from the outside looking in.
Next up: ContainerDays Hamburg (Sep 2–4), KCD Sofia (Sep 29), Devoxx Belgium (Oct 5–9), Dutch Cloud Native Day (Oct 29–30), KubeCon NA in Salt Lake City (Nov 9–12), and Cloud Native Denmark (Nov 19–20). Previously KubeCon EU, Devoxx, DevoxxUK, JavaCro, JCON, Cloudland, JNation, and meetups across Europe.
Topics, formats, and booking →
Writing
Notes on feature flagging, observability, engineering leadership, and where open standards are heading.
Start a conversation
Book half an hour, or send a note with what you’re trying to ship, where it’s stuck, and roughly when. I’ll come back honestly about whether I can help, and if I’m not the right person I usually know who is.
Book a call simon@schrottner.at LinkedIn