Luka Engels
Lead Software Engineer
Agentic AI & LLM Platforms · TypeScript / AWS · Hamburg, fully remote
25 years of production software across real estate SaaS, banking, insurance and telecommunications, the last six fully remote. Today my team builds and maintains an agentic SDLC platform: AI agents on large language models, with a harness of Claude skills, commands, hooks and rules that our engineers work through every day. It holds up in production because the foundation underneath is ordinary engineering discipline, domain-driven design and event-driven serverless architecture on AWS.
About Me
25 years in software development and team leadership, across real estate SaaS, banking, insurance and telecommunications. As Lead Software Engineer I hold the technical direction for a modern SaaS CRM for real estate brokers and I lead six developers inside an eleven-person cross-functional team.
Our team builds and maintains the agentic SDLC that delivers that product. The harness layer is the set of Claude skills, slash commands, hooks and rules the team works through, with Model Context Protocol servers and RAG retrieval connecting agents to our repositories, pipelines and issue tracking. A stakeholder-approved prototype enters the pipeline through specification extraction; agents then groom, implement, review and test, while hooks and rules enforce our standards so throughput does not turn into verification debt.
We also took that capability into the product itself, shipping a customer-facing agentic UI on the Agno framework. None of it would survive contact with production without ordinary engineering discipline underneath.
That discipline is where most of the 25 years went, and the work has always spanned both ends of the stack: Angular and React interfaces, Node.js, NestJS and .NET Core services behind them, and the schemas, queues and indexes underneath. Today that means domain-driven design and event-driven serverless architecture on AWS, using Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, CloudFront and CDK, alongside Azure Kubernetes Service, PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch, with infrastructure as code, tests that mean something, and CI/CD people actually trust. Our team also owns an Angular design system of 87 components in an Nx monorepo.
Full stack
Angular and React at the front, Node.js, NestJS and .NET Core behind them, and the data layer underneath. Shipping at every layer, not only coordinating the people who do.
AWS and Azure
Event-driven serverless on AWS with Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, CloudFront and CDK, alongside Azure Kubernetes Service, PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch. Infrastructure as code, CI/CD by default.
6,000+ customers
The real estate CRM we build serves more than 95,000 users and over 4.2 million managed properties.
11-person team
Six developers, two QA engineers, two product owners and a scrum master. I hold the technical direction and lead the developers.
Professional Experience
Lead Software Engineer
Empro (Whise Group)
Hamburg, Germany · Fully remote
Sep 2024 – Present
Real estate CRM, 6,000+ customers, 95,000+ users, 4.2M+ managed properties. Formed within AVIV Group in Sep 2024, now part of Whise.
Leading engineering direction for a modern SaaS CRM: architectural decisions, the full delivery lifecycle from technical planning to release, and mentoring of developers.
- We built and maintain an agentic SDLC platform with a harness of Claude skills, slash commands, hooks and rules, plus MCP servers and RAG retrieval over our repositories, pipelines and issue tracking.
- We delivered LLM-powered inquiry automation and Elasticsearch-based search across the platform.
- We shipped a customer-facing agentic UI on the Agno framework in Python, extending agent capability from internal delivery tooling into the product itself.
- Our team owns an Angular design system of 87 components in an Nx monorepo. Infrastructure spans AWS with CDK and Azure Kubernetes Service, with PostgreSQL.
- Technical lead for six developers within an eleven-person cross-functional team; co-designed the agent workflow underpinning delivery.
Senior Software Developer (Full-Stack)
immowelt GmbH / AVIV Group GmbH
Hamburg, Germany · Fully remote
Aug 2020 – Sep 2024
One of Germany's largest property portals.
Designing and building scalable microservices and web applications for a high-traffic real estate platform.
- We built cloud services on AWS following domain-driven design, with functional, unit and integration test coverage.
- We contributed to the CI/CD pipelines and worked in Scrum across backlog refinement, sprint planning, wireframes and prototypes.
Senior Software Developer
neveling.net GmbH (now Neveling Reply)
Hamburg, Germany
Sep 2015 – Aug 2020
Software development agency.
Building and maintaining CMS solutions and custom web applications in C#, JavaScript and Sitecore. Responsive front-ends, backend services and third-party API integrations, with release versioning and CI/CD.
Technical Expertise
Everything below is in daily or recent production use, not a wish list.
AI & Agents
- Generative AI (GenAI)
- Large language models (LLMs)
- AI agents and multi-agent systems
- Agno
- Prompt and context engineering
- Claude skills, subagents, slash commands, hooks and rules
- Model Context Protocol (MCP) server design
- RAG pipelines
- Agent workflow architecture
- Guardrail and policy design
- Token-cost engineering
Languages
- TypeScript
- JavaScript
- C#
- Python
- SQL
- Elasticsearch Query Language
- HTML / CSS / Sass
Frontend
- Angular
- React
- Design systems and component libraries
- Nx monorepos
Backend
- Node.js
- NestJS
- .NET Core
- REST
- Event-driven services
Cloud & DevOps
- AWS (Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, CloudFront, CDK)
- Azure (AKS)
- Kubernetes
- PostgreSQL
- Elasticsearch
- Docker
- GitHub Actions
- CI/CD
Practices
- Domain-Driven Design
- Microservices
- TDD
- Agile / Scrum
- Technical leadership and mentoring
Education & Languages
Academic Background
Master of Economics
University of Rijeka
1998 – 2007
Studied part-time alongside employment. A broad economics curriculum covering human resource management, accounting, information technology and marketing, which built the analytical and organisational foundations that bridge business strategy and technical delivery.
Certifications
- MCSD: Web Applications
- MCSA: Web Applications
Languages
- Croatian
- Native
- English
- C2
- Italian
- C1
- German
- B2
Citizenship
German and Croatian
No work authorisation or visa sponsorship needed anywhere in the EU.
Base
Hamburg, Germany
Fully remote since 2020, comfortable across European time zones.
Portfolio Highlights
Agentic SDLC platform
The delivery platform our team built and maintains for the CRM below. A harness of Claude skills, slash commands, hooks and rules that engineers work through daily, with MCP servers and RAG retrieval connecting agents to repositories, pipelines and issue tracking. Used every day by an eleven-person cross-functional team.
Technologies
Empro — Real estate CRM
A modern SaaS CRM for real estate brokers, serving over 6,000 customers, 95,000 users and 4.2 million managed properties. We deliver LLM-powered inquiry automation, search profile matching, AI-generated property descriptions, Elasticsearch-based search, and calendar and email integrations, alongside a customer-facing agentic UI built on the Agno framework.
Technologies
immowelt — Property portal
Scalable microservices and web applications for one of Germany's largest property portals. We built cloud services on AWS following domain-driven design, with functional, unit and integration test coverage, and contributed to the CI/CD pipelines that shipped them.
Technologies
Nivea — Portal & Web Shop
Feature development for the Nivea customer portal and web shop. We built product catalogue pages, shopping cart functionality, loyalty programme integration, and CMS-driven content management across multiple markets, on Sitecore and .NET with Azure underneath.
Technologies
Get In Touch
What I am looking for
Permanent, fully remote roles employed in Germany, at Staff, Principal, Lead or Head of Engineering level, where the agentic and LLM platform work is the job rather than a side quest.
If that is the kind of team you are building, write to me directly. Recruiters are welcome, provided the role is permanent and genuinely remote.