Sebastian Schäfer

Software Engineer

Software Architect

Technical Product Owner

Who am I?

 

Hi! My name is Sebastian, I am a software guy in Ulm, Germany. During my career I have progressed through several different roles so far: I started out as an engineer, became an architect and currently fill a role as a technical product owner.

I have mostly worked in the automotive industry, specializing in the past few years on communication topics, building the basic infrastructure that allows vehicles to send and receive data to and from the internet using various means.

I am most knowledgable in C++, but recently also started dabbling in Rust. For automation, data analysis and testing tasks, I normally tend to use Python, but I'm not an expert.

 

Professional Experience

 
BMW Car IT
Jan. 2017 – today

Car IT is a wholly owned subsidiary of BMW tasked with the development of on-board Software for the whole range of BMW vehicles. The developed software ranges from the base system of various ECUs to high-level customer functions across a wide variety of domains.

Technical Product Owner Telematics Infrastructure

I took over the maintenance of the existing communication infrastructure product Joynr. This includes managing a team of developers at a supplier, as well as conceptualizing new features and orchestrating the integration into a range of ECU generations. Joynr has been deployed to vehicles since 2018, a significant number of vehicles in the overall BMW fleet on the roads worldwide.

As Joynr was no longer fulfilling the requirements of BMW, I also led both the concept and implementation phases of its successor, a streamlined, flexible MQTT-based messaging platform based on open standards. This includes managing a team of internal developers, as well as a team of developers and testers at a supplier.

Software Engineer & Architect

Before my tenure as a technical Product Owner, I had the role of Software Engineer in the team implementing BMW's Remote Software Upgrade capability. Our team was responsible for the implementation of the central vehicle component for RSU in C++.

I progressed into an architectural position for bringing optimized delta installation technologies to the breadth of ECUs in BMW vehicles. After the initial development, I worked to hand over the project to a new development team at a different site.

Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt
May 2013 – Dec. 2016

The German Aerospace Center is a publicly-funded research organisation active in space research, among other areas. I was working for the department of space operations, more specifically the Microgravity User Support Center.

Ground Segment Engineer

In my role as Ground Segment Engineer, I was responsible for setting up and maintaining the control rooms for some of the projects MUSC was responsible for, among them Philae, the first ever comet lander onboard ESA's Rosetta space probe, MASCOT, an asteroid lander onboard the Japanese Hayabusa2, and HP³, the German contribution aboard NASA's InSight Mars lander. Apart from maintaining the client computers in the control room, I was also responsible for the telemetry reception and processing software and contributed to its further development. I also developed software for operating the ground reference models operated as part of the ground segment to support testing of operations procedures.

TNG Jul. 2008 – May 2013

TNG is an Internet Service Provider in Kiel with, at the time, more than 10,000 customers. Beyond the ISP business, TNG was active as a data center operator and solution provider.

Helpdesk / NOC Operator

During my time at university, I worked part-time as a helpdesk attendant and NOC operator at TNG. I was responsible for supporting customers with their Internet access problems, as well as monitoring TNG's and their customer's server and networking infrastructure and fixing or escalating issues to the second level support.

ropa Sep. 2004 – Aug. 2007

ropa was an IT solution provider specialized on small businesses and schools. It also ventured into the space of cinema solutions. The company has since been sold and pivoted its area of business.

Systems Engineer

I had this position during and after high school. I started off supporting other engineers working on maintaining the customer systems we were responsible for, but soon graduated to work on my own, setting up workstations, servers, and entire networks. I also started out in the world of software engineering during that time, creating small applications for customers.

As ropa expanded into the new segment of cinema systems, I was granted the opportunity to start off building a prototype of a digital cinema system that was supposed to replace conventional cinema projection systems. After initially working on both hard- and software, I later focused solely on the software and customer side, as well as special events.

 

Education

 
Ulm University 2018 – May 2022
Business Analytics, Master of Science

Thesis:

Kiel University 2010 – 2013
Computer Science & British and North American Studies, Master of Science

Kiel University 2007 – 2010
Computer Science & English Language and Literature, Bachelor of Arts