Axel Forsberg

Built an AI-powered consultant-to-assignment matching platform. BHS scrapes and ingests job ads from a range of major enterprises, embeds them with Vertex AI, and semantically matches them against GESHDO's consultant CVs using Firestore vector search, with a LLM (Claude) ranking and motivating each match in natural language. Designed the RAG pipeline and an MCP server over Streamable HTTP that exposes the matching engine and CV/company knowledge base to LLM clients, all running serverless on Cloud Run.

BHS now generates consultant sales at a pace comparable to the rest of our sales, creates more than 1,000 consultant-to-assignment matches every month, and is being rolled out to more companies within Generate Group.

Technical leader for the Azure Cloud Excellence (ACE) team, responsible for cost governance, security improvements, and enabling scalable self-service solutions that accelerate delivery for engineering teams across IKEA's Azure estate. Leading the tenant migration of IKEA's CORE retail offer, spanning 11 retailers, 30 markets, and 30+ connected systems, ensuring compliance and operational continuity throughout.

As Platform Owner for RPIC at IKEA, I owned the vision, roadmap, and delivery of the integration platform that supplies 12 retailers with the business-critical data they need to operate, including product range, pricing, and other core commercial data. By building a standardized, governed framework connecting Inter IKEA source systems with retailers and retailer facing systems, I ensured reliable and scalable data flow that franchisee operations depend on daily.

Technical lead for StepStone’s innovation lab, exploring AI, blockchain, and immersive tech (AR/VR) as potential sources of new products, competitive advantage, and cost savings. Acted as technical advisor for a team of engineers through rapid prototyping cycles to validate what was technically feasible and commercially viable, providing the business with concrete go/no-go foundations for emerging technology investments.

As Technical Director and member of GESHDO's leadership team, I guide the company-wide technology strategy, support sales and contribute to the overall direction and growth of the company. Until 2024 the role also included leading the A-Stack (see separate entry).

Led the A-Stack, a unit of four technology teams with four team leads reporting to me and 29 consultants in total. Translated company strategy into clear direction for the team leads, delegated ownership to them and coached them in their leadership. Held line management responsibility, including development talks, salary reviews, recruitment and difficult conversations. Managed expectations from clients and the organisation, and allocated consultants across teams and assignments.

Cloud architect for IKEA's Kitchen Planner, a worldwide tool used by millions of customers to configure and visualize kitchen purchases. The platform had grown complex over time, with increasingly slow development and deployment cycles. As part of the architecture team, we were responsible for simplifying the AWS infrastructure and introducing new AWS capabilities to reduce that overhead, enabling the development teams to ship faster.

Managed the A-Team, a delivery team of ten consultants, with direct line management responsibility. Ran development talks and follow-ups, supported the consultants in their assignments and worked with sales to staff the team on client assignments.

Long-term cloud advisor to Ikano Bank, serving as a trusted second opinion on architecture decisions and a resource for resolving critical issues when they arose. Supported the migration from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud, enabling the bank to reduce operational overhead and decommission legacy systems. Delivered solutions such as a centralized PII data obfuscator to ensure analytics pipelines remained GDPR-compliant.

Member of Ingka Group's Edge Engineering team, a digital strike team tasked with rapidly prototyping and delivering new solutions, and conducting tech due diligence for strategic acquisitions and investments. Built and shipped products deployed across 20+ countries with hundreds of thousands of users. Notable work includes:

• Visual Search, developed in collaboration with Google and presented at Google I/O 2019, letting customers photograph furniture to find matching products in IKEA's range.
• A home office furniture lending system rolled out globally during the pandemic to support remote workers.
• The backend and data pipeline for a cookieless analytics solution running on ikea.com, handling over one billion analytics events.

Tech lead for a team of three developers building Ikano Bank's new web platform. Achieved a perfect PageSpeed score of 100/100 on both desktop and mobile across all categories, reducing the bank's dependency on paid search advertising by improving organic search ranking. Built on a fully serverless AWS architecture, optimized end-to-end for speed, security, and low operational overhead, deployed across 5 countries at an operational cost of under $50/month.

Built a serverless campaign platform on AWS for Sony Mobile, replacing an on-premises system burdened with dependencies and long lead times. The new platform enabled campaigns to be launched faster, with automatic scaling, high availability, and significantly lower operational overhead.

Performed a SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint 2016 migration for 4,000 users at Axis Communications, migrating multiple terabytes of data to a supported platform while eliminating legacy custom code that had accumulated over the years. Rather than a simple database move, extracted and recreated content and solutions from scratch using PowerShell, resulting in a clean, maintainable environment that enabled faster development of modern extensions going forward.

Consultant at GESHDO, delivering cloud development, architecture and technical leadership for clients such as Inter IKEA Systems, Ingka Group, Ikano Bank, StepStone, Sony Mobile and Axis Communications (see individual assignments). Started in hands-on cloud development and infrastructure and have gradually moved into architecture, platform ownership and technical leadership roles, while keeping up with new technology through continuous learning.

Worked as a system developer. Main focus on migration from server-side to client-side APIs for SharePoint On-Premise.

Worked as a system administrator for Windows servers mainly. Managing deployment, monitoring and maintenance of different systems. Large focus on SharePoint farm administration.

Worked as a software test developer introducing automated test for a web platform. Wrote documentation and implemented different test in both C# using Coded UI and PowerShell.