Hi, I'm Phillip.

I am a Senior Software Engineer at Shopware in Schöppingen, working on the Build team where I create self-service tools that empower developers and support educational institutions. I am also interested in automation and have built an internal assistant for our team. I live in Billerbeck and work hybrid, balancing remote work with time in the office.

From 2013 to 2020 I worked in food retail, specifically in butcher shops and meat sales. I completed a full apprenticeship as a Fachverkäufer, managed grilling catering services, and spent nearly six years learning what it means to serve customers, solve problems under pressure and master a craft.

But throughout those years I was always drawn to technology. I spent my free time exploring Linux, learning about computers, and wondering what it would be like to build software instead of just using it. By 2020, at 25 years old, I decided to make the leap.

My journey

I enrolled in a two-year apprenticeship program in IT system integration at IBB Institut für Berufliche Bildung. My classmates had formal prior education in tech, but I had something else: years of self-taught programming from my hobby. While others were catching up on fundamentals, I was diving deeper. By the second year I had become the go-to person for my classmates, helping them debug code and understand concepts. That is when I realised teaching others actually deepened my own understanding.

Those two years were intense and incredibly rewarding. I confirmed something crucial: I had found what I was meant to do. The logical problem-solving, the satisfaction of building something that works, the endless opportunity to learn, and now the joy of helping others understand it too. It all clicked in a way retail never had.

As part of my apprenticeship I needed six months of professional work experience. Shopware gave me that opportunity in their Customer Support team, helping solve real customer problems with Shopware 5 and 6. This was not just an internship. It was my entry point to a company I would eventually build my entire career with.

In June 2022 I graduated with my certification as a Fachinformatiker and transitioned fully to Shopware as a Support Specialist. Support work is where you really learn a system. You see every edge case, every unusual configuration, every way things can break and every way to fix them. Within eight months I had proven myself valuable enough to be promoted to Support Expert.

Over the next two years I became known as someone who could solve the tricky problems. I learned both Shopware 5 and 6 architectures inside and out and built strong relationships with customers and internal engineering teams. Along the way I noticed how much time we all spent setting up test environments.

So I decided to solve it. I built Shopware Build, a self-service portal that lets anyone spin up fully configured Shopware 5 or 6 instances on demand, in minutes instead of hours. The tool worked so well that word spread. What started as my side project to solve our own pain point became something the entire organisation relied on.

In January 2025 I moved into a role as Senior Technical Enablement Manager, partly to manage the growing Shopware Build project. By June 2025 the project needed dedicated focus, so I officially joined the Shopware Portals team as a Software Engineer, the team that looks after our developer-facing platforms.

In January 2026 I was promoted to Senior Software Engineer. Four years earlier I had no professional experience in tech at all, so that title still takes some getting used to.

What I like most is that the platform also supports education. Schools and universities can teach e-commerce on a real system, which makes the work feel worth doing.

I changed careers at 27, started from zero, and within three years found myself doing work I genuinely love. If that is not proof that passion and commitment pay off, I do not know what is.