Florian Strauf

Location: Mount Maunganui, New Zealand | Email: [email protected] | LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/florian-strauf-50800965

Professional Summary

A high-velocity, forward-deployed Solutions Architect and former CTO with over 20 years of experience bridging massive enterprise complexity with agile, zero-to-one product execution. Exceptional track record of taking ambiguous customer requirements, aligning them with C-suite business strategy, and independently engineering production-ready validation systems. Brings deep expertise across enterprise solution architecture, SAP ecosystem integration, and technical leadership — with a current focus on modern AI automation, agentic workflows, and complex data orchestrations across legacy and modern tech stacks.

Core Pillars of Expertise

Forward-Deployed Delivery & Prototyping: Expert at embedding with clients to rapidly dissect complex problems, build functional MVPs from scratch, and validate production pipelines without relying on heavy supporting infrastructure.

Enterprise Architecture & Integration: Deep foundational expertise navigating complex legacy enterprise ecosystems (including 15+ years of core SAP DNA), ensuring modern software architectures seamlessly integrate with messy systems-of-record.

Technical Leadership & Zero-to-One Execution: Proven capability as a startup founder and CTO, driving technical strategy, scaling infrastructure, and managing successful product acquisitions.

AI Automation & Full-Stack Engineering: Hands-on developer specializing in building modern LLM/RAG pipelines, task orchestration frameworks, and robust backends using Node.js, PostgreSQL, Rust, Python, and modular automation.

Selected Professional Experience

Independent AI Automation Engineer & Product Builder

Learned Late / Independent Practice | 2024 – Present

Designed, built, and operate production AI automation systems and agentic workflows from ambiguous requirements, rapidly turning ideas into measurable results. Focus on LLM/RAG pipelines, task orchestration, and complex data integrations across modern and legacy systems.
Built and run a fully agentic SEO workflow automating keyword research, content generation, cannibalisation analysis, publishing, and performance-driven iteration — currently generating 600,000+ monthly search impressions and thousands of organic clicks with zero ad spend.
Delivered a production-ready ArcGIS spatial data integration for the New Zealand Kiwifruit industry, mapping complex geospatial datasets into core operational business workflows.
Developed and maintain live Rust (rig) + Python AI pipelines as a rapid experimentation environment for RAG retrieval tuning, content operations automation, build-vs-buy decisions, and agentic tool orchestration.
Create technical roadmaps, system architectures, and visual strategy assets to support AI transformation initiatives for businesses and my own product initiatives.

Founder & Builder, Days to Expiry

Options Income SaaS | 2025 – Present

Founded and built a niche options-income SaaS from concept to a small base of ~10 paying users, demonstrating end-to-end product delivery from broker-statement ingestion to AI-assisted trade analytics.
Parsed and normalized broker statements into a structured, options-focused portfolio view, then layered on AI-driven analysis to help users evaluate covered-call, put-selling, and other income strategies against their actual holdings.
Iterated continuously based on early-user feedback; while the venture remained modest in scale, it provided hands-on validation of rapid MVP delivery, RAG-based market analysis, and production monitoring in a regulated-adjacent domain.

CTO & Technical Co-Founder

Web3 / Crypto Startup (Acquired) | 2021 – 2024

Led the end-to-end technical strategy, architecture, and engineering lifecycle for a high-growth startup from inception through a successful business sale.
Served as a hands-on technical executive, balancing high-level investor/C-suite relations with concrete backend architecture design.
Grew the Forgd.com platform from concept to 1,000+ users in under 12 months, scaling the engineering team from 4 to 14.
Built and led a 3,000-member consulting community and token-launch SaaS for modelling supply/demand curves, running the business through acquisition by Forgd.com.

Senior Enterprise Architect

SAP & SER Group | 2006 – 2021

Delivered high-level strategic technical advisory directly to enterprise board members, mapping complex software requirements to corporate roadmaps.
Designed and implemented core architecture integrations within the SAP ecosystem, establishing robust content archiving and data-handling systems.
Served as Senior Solution Architect in the SAP Centre of Excellence, connecting customer requirements to solution architecture, roadmap planning, and product extension strategy for Intelligent Asset Management.
Shaped SAP’s board-level strategy for emerging AI-adjacent and decentralised technologies, including crypto payments, token-based revenue models, and Catena-X / Gaia-X supply-chain carbon use cases across the German automotive industry.
Acted as trusted advisor to Fortune Global 100 / Fortune 500 organisations, including APM Terminals, Port of Hamburg, Port of Singapore, and Port of Rotterdam, owning solution architecture from concept through production handover.
Led technical delivery teams from PoC to live production cloud environments, specialising in IoT, spatial/mapping integrations, data-driven architectures, and custom SAP extensions.
Led cloud customers out of escalation by analysing and improving system performance; recognised with SAP Catalyst / Fast Track awards in 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019.

Technical Toolkit

Languages & Frameworks: Node.js, JavaScript, Python, TypeScript, Google Apps Script.

Databases & Infra: PostgreSQL, Relational Database Design, Enterprise Cloud Architecture.

AI & Orchestration: LLM/RAG pipelines, Task Automation Tools, Embeddings, Vector Stores.

Enterprise Ecosystems: Deep SAP ERP integration, ECM (Enterprise Content Management), SAP BTP

Education

Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.), FOM University of Applied Sciences for Economics and Management, Köln/Bonn, Germany (2014)
Apprenticeship as Development Consultant, IHK Germany (2008)

Additional Activities

Writing: Over 2,300 readers follow my writing at LearnedLate.