Axel Forsberg

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.

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.

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. Also delivered solutions such as a home office furniture lending system rolled out globally during the pandemic to support remote workers.

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.

I am currently working as the Technical Director at GESHDO. In this role, I am responsible for providing guidance and direction for our company wide technology strategy, managing our team of managers, and supporting our sales efforts. I am also a member of our leadership team, contributing to the overall direction and growth of our company. I have a strong background in technology and a deep understanding of the latest trends and best practices in the field. As the Technical Director, I am dedicated to helping our teams achieve success and delivering exceptional value to our clients. I am committed to driving innovation and fostering a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement.

I started out as a IT consultant at GESHDO. During my time here I have pivoted from mainly hands-on assignments involving cloud development and infrastructure to more hands-off and high level technical roles. However I still keeps up with the latest trends in technology by continuous learning.

Additionally, I have managed a delivery team known as the A-Team, consisting of ten consultants. This role further honed my leadership and managerial skills, contributing to my comprehensive expertise in the technology sector.

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.