// dossierTobias
Now: Head of Product, Data & AI // SQUER // ViennaI build technology organizations, and I build the business around them, in industries where getting it wrong has real consequences. Fifteen years growing one IT function to 100 people across 14 countries. Two startups built from zero. A commercial unit to build now.
Tobias
Kilga
Now: Head of Product, Data & AI // SQUER // ViennaI build technology organizations, and I build the business around them, in industries where getting it wrong has real consequences. Fifteen years growing one IT function to 100 people across 14 countries. Two startups built from zero. A commercial unit to build now.
// the story
I’ve spent my career building two things: technology organizations, and the businesses that pay for them. Fifteen years growing one IT function from a helpdesk seat into a 100-person global operation, two startups built from zero, and now a commercial unit to build at SQUER. I came to advising the long way round, and the order matters: I don’t sell plans I couldn’t staff, budget, and run myself.
I joined MED-EL in 2010 as an IT helpdesk specialist. The company makes cochlear implants, devices that restore hearing, and I was struck immediately by how much the technology mattered to the person on the other end of it. When your systems sit behind something that important, “works on my machine” doesn’t cut it. I stayed fifteen years and five roles, and by the end I ran the global IT function: around 100 people across 14 countries and 30+ sites, a multimillion-euro budget, and an operating model I had to design rather than inherit.
Most of that job was people. Deciding what each level owned, hiring the regional leads, and building managers who could hold a standard without escalating it to me. The model was decentralized delivery on centralized governance, which only works if the regional leads have real authority and are willing to use it. The visible results were the company’s first AI strategy, internal AI tools in production, and ISO 27001 certification. The result I’m prouder of is quieter: long before I left, the organization had stopped needing me day to day. My managers carried the audits, the budgets, and the hiring themselves.
Around 2023, I started building on the side. I co-founded Veriyou, a real-time deepfake detection startup, and helped build Walnuts Digital, an AI-strategy practice, from the ground up — both alongside the day job. I also took the CTPO role at LIT Health, where we built an AI-powered diabetes management app. That one was personal: I’ve been diabetic since 1999, and I’ve watched the technology get more impressive every year while staying frustrating to live with. That’s where my bar comes from. Not whether it demos well, but whether it holds up for the person depending on it at 3am. Building from zero while running a global function also settled something for me: growing an organization and starting one are different crafts, and I wanted both.
In January 2025, I left MED-EL and co-founded Flex.Insight, a deliberately small advisory practice for AI strategy, implementation, and organizational transformation. No bloated teams, no work theater. The premise was simple: advice is only worth taking from someone who can build the thing. In October 2025, SQUER asked me to lead their Product, Data & AI unit; I ran both through the end of the year, then wound Flex down and took the larger canvas full-time.
What I do now is build a business. I own the commercial side of the unit: what we sell, who we sell it to, how it’s priced, and the accounts and conversations that close it. The discipline is declining the work we can’t staff. That’s easier when you’ve been the person on the hook for it. Governance and security positioning for regulated clients is mine too, because in MedTech I spent years on the receiving end of both. I still architect and write code, and it keeps my judgment calibrated on what’s genuinely deliverable and what’s a slide. The bar hasn’t moved since the helpdesk: if I can’t point at a team that still delivers it, I haven’t finished the argument.
I joined MED-EL in 2010 as an IT helpdesk specialist. The company makes cochlear implants, devices that restore hearing, and I was struck immediately by how much the technology mattered to the person on the other end of it. When your systems sit behind something that important, “works on my machine” doesn’t cut it. I stayed fifteen years and five roles, and by the end I ran the global IT function: around 100 people across 14 countries and 30+ sites, a multimillion-euro budget, and an operating model I had to design rather than inherit.
Most of that job was people. Deciding what each level owned, hiring the regional leads, and building managers who could hold a standard without escalating it to me. The model was decentralized delivery on centralized governance, which only works if the regional leads have real authority and are willing to use it. The visible results were the company’s first AI strategy, internal AI tools in production, and ISO 27001 certification. The result I’m prouder of is quieter: long before I left, the organization had stopped needing me day to day. My managers carried the audits, the budgets, and the hiring themselves.
Around 2023, I started building on the side. I co-founded Veriyou, a real-time deepfake detection startup, and helped build Walnuts Digital, an AI-strategy practice, from the ground up — both alongside the day job. I also took the CTPO role at LIT Health, where we built an AI-powered diabetes management app. That one was personal: I’ve been diabetic since 1999, and I’ve watched the technology get more impressive every year while staying frustrating to live with. That’s where my bar comes from. Not whether it demos well, but whether it holds up for the person depending on it at 3am. Building from zero while running a global function also settled something for me: growing an organization and starting one are different crafts, and I wanted both.
In January 2025, I left MED-EL and co-founded Flex.Insight, a deliberately small advisory practice for AI strategy, implementation, and organizational transformation. No bloated teams, no work theater. The premise was simple: advice is only worth taking from someone who can build the thing. In October 2025, SQUER asked me to lead their Product, Data & AI unit; I ran both through the end of the year, then wound Flex down and took the larger canvas full-time.
What I do now is build a business. I own the commercial side of the unit: what we sell, who we sell it to, how it’s priced, and the accounts and conversations that close it. The discipline is declining the work we can’t staff. That’s easier when you’ve been the person on the hook for it. Governance and security positioning for regulated clients is mine too, because in MedTech I spent years on the receiving end of both. I still architect and write code, and it keeps my judgment calibrated on what’s genuinely deliverable and what’s a slide. The bar hasn’t moved since the helpdesk: if I can’t point at a team that still delivers it, I haven’t finished the argument.
// track record
2025 – Present
SQUERHead of Product, Data & AI
- Own the commercial side of the Product, Data & AI unit: strategy, go-to-market, and sales across product, data, and AI services.
- Decide what we sell and to whom. Offer design, pricing, positioning, strategic accounts, and the sales conversations themselves rather than a handover to someone else.
- Lead and develop my direct reports, principals and stream leads among them: hiring, goal-setting, and growing the next layer of leaders.
- Turn one-off consulting expertise into repeatable offers, deciding what stays bespoke and what becomes a product the unit can sell again.
- Own governance and security positioning for client engagements, especially in regulated industries where compliance is a hard requirement rather than a slide.
- Also served as interim Head of Engineering for a client’s digital logistics platform (millions of transactions across 10+ integrated systems), clarifying team boundaries and system interfaces so teams could ship predictably.
Jan – Dec 2025
Flex.Insight AdvisoryCo-Founder
- Co-founded a deliberately small advisory practice for AI strategy, implementation, and organizational transformation, built on the premise that the people giving the advice should be the ones accountable for making it work.
- Select client work, strategy through to hands-on delivery. Every engagement was staffed by the people doing the work: no handoffs, no shadow teams.
- Wrote publicly about why AI programs stall on the way to production, including a piece on enshittification in the workplace that traveled well past its intended audience.
- Wound the practice down after twelve months to take the SQUER role full-time.
2024 – 2025
LIT HealthChief Technology & Product Officer
- Led technology and product for Melia, an AI-driven diabetes management app that gives patients real-time insight into their own data. A venture role held alongside my position at MED-EL.
- Built the cloud infrastructure from scratch under healthcare-grade privacy requirements (GDPR, HIPAA). My first patient-facing product, and a different discipline from internal IT tooling.
2024
Walnuts DigitalPartner – AI Strategy
- Helped build the AI-strategy practice from zero while working with enterprise clients to integrate AI into their operations: finding where it makes sense, building it, and getting people to use it once it existed. Part-time, alongside my role at MED-EL.
2019 – 2025
MED-ELHead of Corporate Information Technology
- Ran the global IT function for a cochlear implant company: infrastructure, operations, security, and service management across 14 countries and 30+ sites.
- Scaled the organization from a small local support group to around 100 people on a multimillion-euro budget. Set the operating model (decentralized delivery, centralized governance), hired the regional leads, and built managers who could hold a standard without escalating it to me.
- Developed MED-EL’s first AI strategy: identified where AI could have real impact, built internal capability, got executive buy-in, and started shipping tools.
- Built and deployed internal AI-powered tools in collaboration with business and product teams. The hardest part was never the model. It was the last mile: making something that ran in a notebook survive a Monday morning.
- Set up the company’s AI governance framework: data classification, ownership model, audit controls. In MedTech, you can’t just deploy a model and hope for the best.
- Led the organization through ISO 27001:2022, UK Cyber Essentials, and CyberTrust Gold Label certification.
2023 – 2024
BAFIT – University of InnsbruckBoard Member
- Board member of the Banking, Finance, and IT network, bridging academic research and industry practice on digital and technology topics.
2023 – 2024
VeriyouCo-Founder & CTO
- Built a real-time deepfake detection system from scratch: RTMP stream analysis, scalable architecture, and the core detection models.
- Built in parallel with my day job at MED-EL. My first product from zero outside a corporate environment, with a completely different pace and set of constraints.
2017 – 2019
MED-ELManager, IT Operations
- Managed global IT operations, including Opex/Capex budgets, vendor relationships, and the first serious automation initiatives across the company.
2016 – 2017
MED-ELTeam Leader, Communications Infrastructure
- Responsible for global VoIP, video conferencing, and mobile device management, making sure 2,000+ people across 14 countries could talk to each other reliably.
2010 – 2016
MED-ELIT Helpdesk Specialist → Manager, Corporate IT Helpdesk
- Where it all started. Joined as an IT helpdesk specialist and built up the corporate helpdesk function: standardized processes, introduced new tools, and learned that most IT problems are really problems of understanding what someone was trying to do.
// toolkit
Executive LeadershipFifteen years of budgets, vendor negotiations, audits, and the case for why the technology plan is the business plan. I make that case to the board and the architecture argument to the engineers, ideally in the same meeting.
Building OrganizationsGrew MED-EL’s IT function from a small local group into around 100 people across 14 countries, on a multimillion-euro budget. The work is rarely the org chart. It’s deciding what each level owns, hiring leaders you can trust with a standard, and making the model survive the first time it’s tested.
Commercial LeadershipAt SQUER I own what the Product, Data & AI unit sells: offer design, pricing, positioning, strategic accounts, and the sales conversations themselves. The interesting problem in an engineering-led firm is turning genuine expertise into offers that are concrete enough to scope and repeatable enough to scale.
AI AdoptionWrote MED-EL’s first AI strategy, got it funded at executive level, and shipped internal AI tools people actually used. Led an AI health product at LIT Health. The pattern is always the same: the model is 20% of the work. The other 80% is ownership, governance, data quality, and earning the trust of the people whose work changes.
Delivery LeadershipI’ve led teams from 5 to 100 people across IT, product, engineering, and data, including an interim Head of Engineering mandate on a client platform. The thing I keep coming back to: teams ship reliably when they have clear ownership, shared definitions of done, and someone willing to remove blockers instead of adding process.
IT TransformationAt MED-EL, I took a fragmented IT landscape spread across 14 countries and turned it into something coherent. Cloud migration, architecture cleanup, technical debt reduction. But the hardest part was always getting 30+ sites to agree on how things should work.
Security & GovernanceLed MED-EL through ISO 27001:2022, UK Cyber Essentials, and CyberTrust Gold Label certification. Later dealt with GDPR and HIPAA at LIT Health. Security in regulated industries isn’t a checkbox. It’s an operating model that touches everything. I built an interactive DACH data-protection reference for mainstream AI tools to make that kind of assessment concrete instead of theoretical.
Regulated IndustriesMedTech at MED-EL, healthcare at LIT Health, financial services and logistics through client work. Every regulated industry has its own flavor of “you can’t just deploy that.” The discipline underneath, trading speed against evidence, is the same everywhere.
Product ManagementCame to product management from the IT and engineering side, which means I think about operability and maintenance from day one. At SQUER, I shape how we position and sell our product capabilities, connecting commercial strategy with what our teams can deliver.
Hands-On EngineeringI still architect and write production systems myself, most recently an AI funding-advisory agent and a content platform for pharma. Not because the role demands it, but because it keeps my judgment honest: I can tell when a plan is deliverable, and when a prototype is nowhere near production.
// credentials
University of LiverpoolMSc Information Systems Management (2017–2019). Studied how leadership shapes an organization’s ability to innovate with technology, a question I kept running into at work and wanted to understand properly.
MCI – Management Center InnsbruckBA in Economics (2014–2017). Built the foundation in business and economics while already working in IT. The thesis came directly from what I was seeing on the job: how IT teams manage innovation day to day.
// signal