Lars Baunwall

I lead architecture for Digital Core, the ~200-engineer programme building Danske Bank’s next core platform: cloud-native, domain-driven and event-driven, replacing a mainframe estate one domain at a time. I sit on the tribe leadership team, own direction for the Customer and Accounts domains and lead the Architecture Chapter.

• Led the organisational redesign behind the tribe’s move to Team Topologies: two value streams and a platform team. Outcome: e.g. fewer cross-team dependencies, shorter lead time
• Member of the tribe leadership team alongside delivery, product and people leads, responsible for technology and organisational strategy
• Line manager for 10–12 architects in Denmark, Lithuania and India, with full responsibility for hiring, performance and development. Hired 7 across all three locations
• Shared accountability for delivery
• Built a written decision practice that any engineer can read and challenge: 40+ architecture decisions and around 1,500 comments in two years
• Built CoreIQ, the tribe’s first agentic harness, which brings decision records, guidance and technology choices into the AI assistants engineers already use

First Principal Engineer at the LEGO Group, hired to work out how architecture should be practised across a digital organisation of several hundred engineers. The role was new. A lot of what it turned into was shaped in those early years, above all the move of architecture out of static decks and into the engineering workflow itself: open repositories, pull requests, peer review.

• Worked directly with the CTO on technology strategy and architecture direction in my final year, with recurring joint decision sessions
• Helped define what the Principal Engineer role owned and how it made decisions, as the function grew to 14 across roughly ten departments
• Set group-wide architecture principles and API design standards, adopted across the digital portfolio
• Built inner-source engineering communities on GitHub where standards came from the engineers who used them and proposals moved by consent
• Coached senior engineering leaders and architects on platform thinking, DDD and event-driven architecture

Independent technology strategy and architecture practice between full-time roles. Main engagements with the LEGO Group and MobilePay, plus smaller delivery work for Danish companies. Scope: technology strategy, domain and platform design, operating model design and coaching of engineering leaders.

Embedded technology strategy advisor to the VP of a 400-person digital organisation, with a direct hand in architecture direction and platform strategy.

• Wrote the executive narratives behind the major platform and architecture calls, so the leadership team could see what each decision was meant to achieve and what it would cost
• Ran architecture workshops that got delivery teams aligned on domain boundaries and integration patterns across a large product portfolio
• Introduced platform thinking and DDD by pairing with teams and architects on real designs
• This engagement led directly to the Principal Engineer role I took on in 2021

External architect and engineer embedded in the MobilePay product organisation, building payment products on a distributed .NET stack.

• Co-built MobilePay POS and MyShop from scratch, as both engineer and architecture lead, using domain-driven design and event-driven architecture
• Applied DDD in a regulated, high-throughput payments product serving 3 million Danish users
• Stepped in as interim team lead and scrum master during a transition period

Platform Architect in LEGO’s in-house digital agency, responsible for the technical strategy and build of the Digital Experience Platform behind LEGO.com and its connected properties.

• Defined and led the move to a search-based, content-centric service architecture serving 30M+ monthly visitors
• Led the delivery team on a .NET and Sitecore stack
• Wrote and facilitated the platform strategy with department leadership, using the Playing to Win framework

IT Architect advising senior management on IT strategy and portfolio governance across global retail operations. Led the architecture of a multichannel retail platform (loyalty, 3D customisation, e-commerce) for the franchise network.

.NET developer and small-team lead on custom ASP.NET and SharePoint solutions for Danish enterprise clients. Introduced Scrum to the organisation.