Matthias Webhofer

Experience

Senior Software / DevOps Engineer · viesure innovation center

Vienna · part of Wiener Städtische (Vienna Insurance Group) · March 2020 – present

• Started on the backend of Losleben's predecessor, a private-health-insurance-claims PoC released to test the product direction. Worked across every backend domain. The first Losleben release was effectively a rebrand of that PoC, and parts of the original backend still ship in Losleben today, which has held the #1 spot among Austrian insurance apps for 4–5 years since release.
• Started a claims-automation project for the group's claims service centre (SCPV), which had a backlog of weeks to months on health-insurance claims. Spent two months on requirements engineering with the product owner and an insurance-domain expert (job shadowing, SCPV-employee interviews), then took an IBM mainframe training to be able to build against it. With the mainframe off-limits due to an ongoing migration to SAP, built UiPath terminal-scraping bots on Windows VMs (UiPath Orchestrator) for read/write access. Business logic ran in a Java microservice with rules modelled as BPMN in Camunda, behind a Hexagonal Architecture seam so the eventual SAP cutover would be a clean adapter swap.
• The PoC went live in production in about 6 months. Pharmacy bills started at 50% automated, climbing to 70% with rule tweaks. Health-insurance bills followed within two months, reaching 60% automation. Most claims were paid out within 1–2 days, which was not standard in Austria at the time and remains rare.
• When SAP came online, the adapter swap was clean: sharp drops in error rate and runtime versus the screen-scraping era. After extending the automation to dentist bills and other niche categories, dismantled the UiPath layer and handed the service over to twinformatics, the sister IT company that runs production. This was the first viesure project to fully graduate, and it remains the base for their claims automation, now extended beyond health insurance.
• Back on the Losleben backend team, built the support-chat and document-inbox feature, integrated into Mediatrix (first-level support) so agents see Losleben messages alongside email and social channels, with on-the-fly enrichment attaching internal user data to each message. The feature landed with customers more strongly than anyone expected. A follow-on iteration added digital legal-document delivery into Losleben via SAP DMS polling, replacing snail mail. A parallel Rasa chatbot experiment was dropped as LLMs began to mature. Built it in Kotlin on Spring Boot, switching from the team's Java on Spring Boot default. The first Kotlin service at viesure, and the default for new backend work since.
• Co-formed an AI task force and spent a year working on it, evaluating AI possibilities and concrete use cases for the company. Worked with Google and Nagarro on technical evaluations and stakeholder presentations, and stood up the company's internal AI sandboxes on GCP (including Gemini Enterprise).
• Stepped in for a year to cover the SRE/DevOps team while it was short-handed. Responsible for the K8s cluster, the surrounding GCP estate, and the IaC. Major projects that period: company-wide Okta rollout (integration with all services, onboarding everyone, ongoing access requests, user lifecycle, dual internal/external identities), moving off JFrog Artifactory (registries and security scans), migrating IaC from kpt to Helmfile (full rewrite plus easy-to-use Helmfiles for devs), and steady GitLab CI pipeline work and bug-hunting in K8s and GCP.
• Currently back on AI strategy as the task force has matured. Now in the early phase of a major project to revamp automated claims processing end-to-end, including reshaping long-standing operating models at the partner insurance companies.

Software Engineer · Splendit IT Consulting

Vienna · 2017 – 2020

• Built and maintained an automated Java source-code refactoring toolchain for migrating codebases across Java versions (Java 7 to 8 plus any-to-any cross-version upgrades). Eclipse JDT plugin for the IDE side, with diff view across touched files and granular rule selection via pre- and user-defined profiles. Paired Maven plugin for CI, configured via YAML.
• Hundreds of AST-level transformation rules in total, researched and added per Java release. Eclipse's OSGi runtime and the JDT's thin documentation meant most rules required reading JDT source directly to implement them safely.
• Used by ITSV (Austria's public health insurers' IT arm) and parts of the German Land Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, among others, for production Java version migrations.
• Alongside product work, ran the company's IT end to end: office networking (including laying physical cables during an office move), a bare-metal Ubuntu server hosting on-prem Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, and Jenkins, and a company NAS with an offsite replica at the boss's home. Personally responsible for the office security system: cameras, alarms, and the digital key plus fingerprint entry.
• Represented the product at industry events including Devoxx Paris and smaller Austrian trade fairs. Also delivered a 30-minute conference talk on automated Java refactoring at a Microsoft event in Vienna.

Tutor · TU Wien (Vienna University of Technology)

Vienna · 2014 – 2016

• Tutor for two courses: Software Engineering and Project Management (SEPM, 4th-semester Bachelor) and Advanced Software Engineering (ASE, 2nd-semester Master). Recruited directly by the professor while still studying for the Bachelor.
• Graded the individual qualifying project (a fitness filter that opened each course) independently per student via a one-hour oral grading session. Professor only consulted before failing someone.
• Mentored 2–4 student groups of 4–6 each through a semester-long group project, a real-world simulation running full Redmine (tickets, Gantt, milestones, time tracking) and git.
• Held one to two hour-long meetings per group each week for guidance. Bi-weekly internal reviews evaluated code, documentation, and project-management data, feeding the professor's management review. Joint grading at the final presentation closed the semester.
• Also supervised the written exams for the theoretical part of both courses.

Summer Software Engineer · EBS Smart Solutions Software

Lienz, Austria · 1–2 months each summer · 2007 – 2016

• Ten consecutive summers at the same company across HTL and university years. The first two fulfilled the 8-week mandatory internship required for HTL Matura, the rest were voluntary paid work across multiple IT disciplines.
• Reverse-engineered AutoCAD's mostly undocumented C# plugin layer (in a debugger, one API call at a time) to build a bidirectional sync between AutoCAD drawings and the in-house ERP via local MSMQ. Shipped as beta.
• Built the EDIFACT import/export module. The initial C# fat-client implementation proved too slow, so moved the full pipeline (accumulation, filtering, EDIFACT generation) into T-SQL stored procedures with the client reduced to invoking them. Export time dropped from minutes to seconds.
• Wrote T-SQL stored procedures for the Mentor / Neccton gambling-monitoring product, used by Österreichische Lotterien on win2day.at and now deployed widely across Europe. Same summer also covered smaller BI/DWH stored procedures for other customers.
• Tasked with picking the company's cross-platform mobile tooling when there was no mobile team and no hires available. Evaluated C# and JavaScript-based cross-compilers that targeted iOS and Android while exposing device-specific APIs. The recommendation was adopted and remained in production until displaced by newer frameworks.