Sebastian Illing
CTO at Maestro Labs | The team behind MailMaestro, TeamsMaestro & CalMaestro
Berlin, Germany
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolSebastian Illing is a seasoned technology leader and CTO based in Berlin with 12 years of experience building AI-driven products and scalable web platforms. Currently leading Maestro Labs, he blends product-focused leadership with hands-on engineering, shipping suite products like MailMaestro and TeamsMaestro that apply AI to workplace productivity. His background spans startups and research — from co-founding customer-facing ventures (Alpaca, WGcast) to leading technical development on a government-funded climate informatics project at Freie Universität Berlin. Sebastian is an active backend contributor to the Django ecosystem, having implemented payment integrations and modernized templated-email tooling, demonstrating practical expertise in Python, APIs, and operational systems. He pairs academic rigor from physics and climate informatics with entrepreneurial instincts, often turning complex domain problems into pragmatic, automated solutions. An interesting but less obvious strength is his ability to bridge high-performance scientific computing and consumer-focused SaaS engineering, enabling robust systems across very different scales.
12 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Phd Student, Climate Informatics, Phd Student, Climate Informatics at Freie Universität BerlinDiplom, Physics, Diplom, Physics at Heidelberg University
Stackoverflow
11,329reputation
1.4mreached
181answers
34questions
rest
top-5%
django
top-1%
django-rest-framework
top-1%
python
top-1%
django-urls
top-5%
django-models
top-1%
Github Skills (25)
apim10
maintenance10
python10
django10
django-models10
api10
payment10
django-rest-framework10
http-request10
pagination9
rest9
django-views9
xml9
pip9
django-urls9
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
vintasoftware/django-templated-email
Jul 2015 - Feb 2016
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:10 commits, 3 PRs, 3 comments in 7 months
Contributions summary:Sebastian primarily contributed to improving the project's compatibility and maintainability. They added Python 3 support, ensuring the code functions correctly with newer Python versions. Additionally, they updated dependencies by integrating the `six` library for compatibility and updated the setup configurations, demonstrating a focus on modernizing and maintaining the project.
mailpythonprovidertransactionaldjango
jazzband/django-payments
May 2015 - Jun 2015
Universal payment handling for Django.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:8 commits, 3 PRs, 3 comments in 22 days
Contributions summary:Sebastian primarily contributed to implementing a payment provider for Sofort.com within the Django payments library. Their work included creating the necessary files, templates, and logic for processing Sofort transactions, including handling redirects, processing data, and implementing refund functionality. The contributions demonstrate proficiency in utilizing the Sofort API and integrating it with the Django framework. They also improved the authorizenet and dotpay payment methods and fixed a type error in payments/fields.py.
paymentsgoogle-walletpythonstripedjango-framework
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