# automatics is my engineering practice.

> Mircea Preotu: twenty years shipping software, three-time startup CTO, nine years with firma.de. The background behind automatics.

Story

I build the systems a business runs on, from the front door to the back office, and automate the work between them, so the team gets its hours back without hiring. I decide what gets built, my AI agents carry out the execution, and I check every result before it reaches you.

I've spent twenty years shipping software, mostly in regulated, process-heavy German businesses. I run Engineering, Product and Operations as one team, translating both ways and building the bridge together with the teams. I built an engineering and product organisation from four to thirty-five direct reports in twelve months, ran in-house and offshore engineering teams, and owned a company-wide operating model linking engineering, product, fulfilment and finance. I was technical lead on three corporate transactions, and I stay hands-on building systems and teams.

![Mircea Preotu working at a desk](https://automatics.dev/assets/team/mircea-desk-640.jpg)

## Background

1. 2026 – today

   Founder, automatics

   Business operating systems for lean, process-heavy companies: workflow automation, systems that fit together, and growth without extra headcount.
2. 2022 – 2026

   CTO and Product Engineer, firma.de

   Rebuilt operations around standardisation and automation across sales, fulfilment and finance, all working as one team. firma.de was acquired by beglaubigt.de in 2026.
3. 2017 – 2022

   Solutions Engineer and Engineering Lead

   Independent consultant, managing in-house engineering teams, building software and data systems for 8P, Avala Capital, Berliner Berg, DEGIS, firma.de, LegalZoom, and others.
4. 2016 – 2017

   CTO, Legalbase

   Grew the team from 4 to around 35 direct reports in twelve months. Legalbase became Germany's largest trademark registrar and was acquired by firma.de.
5. 2012 – 2015

   CTO, nextsocial

   Social commerce campaigns and white-label shops for Bayern München, Warner Brothers, Bravado, Nuclear Blast, and many many more.
6. 2010 – 2012

   Co-founder and CTO, Commentarist

   Brought the editorials of over 40 German-language newspapers into one place, with early machine learning sorting them by topic.
7. 2005 – 2010

   Software Engineer and Team Lead

   First job at 19. Portals and enterprise projects for clients including Vodafone, UNICEF and Sprint Nextel.

## What I build

The systems a business runs on, from the front door to the back office. Websites that bring in work. Portals and internal tools people move through without a week of training. Data systems that give revenue, capacity, and pipeline one place to live. Agentic workflows that carry repetitive work end to end, with a person checking the output instead of typing it.

Everything lands in your accounts from the first week: your cloud, your data, your repositories. When the engagement ends you keep the running system, not a login to mine.

## How I work

I map how work moves through the business before anything gets built: where each record actually lives, who touches it, and what that costs in hours. The workflow map comes first, the software second.

You talk to the person building it, so decisions happen in days instead of steering meetings. My AI agents carry out the execution, and I review every change before it ships. For design and front-end I bring in specialists from my network. Everything still passes through my review.

## Who I work with

Lean, process-heavy companies, often in regulated fields: legal, tax and company services, and technical and industrial B2B firms, mostly in Germany and the wider EU.

At firma.de, Germany's largest company formation platform, the systems I built cut client onboarding from days to under an hour and doubled monthly volume on the same twelve-person team.

## Where to go next

[Approach](https://automatics.dev/approach/)

[Services](https://automatics.dev/#services)

[Tell me where operations are stuck](https://automatics.dev/contact/)

---

Markdown version of https://automatics.dev/story/
Agent guide: https://automatics.dev/llms.txt · Sitemap: https://automatics.dev/sitemap.xml