With the appointment of Michael Gürtner as chief technical officer and Klaus Kolitz as head of software engineering, Sixt is underscoring the company’s increasing tech focus.

With the launch of the new Sixt app at the end of February 2019, the company has demonstrated the increasing importance of IT for the further development of its business model. Since 2010, Sixt has almost quadrupled the number of tech employees from 150 to more than 550.

As of July 1, Gürtner will be responsible for technology strategy and initiatives at Sixt in the newly created position of CTO. He previously worked as CTO at the Bosch start-up SAST (Security and Safety Things) GmbH for three years, where he was responsible for the development of an IoT ecosystem for the security industry. Gürtner has many years of experience in agile software development, cloud technologies, and artificial intelligence. He studied electrical engineering at the Technical University of Munich where he completed his doctorate there in the context of IoT.

E-commerce expert Kolitz has been head of engineering at Sixt since May 1. With more than 20 years of expertise in the field of software development, he will lead global software development at the five development centres in Pullach, Rostock, Berlin, Kiev, and Bangalore. He previously worked as head of hotel search engineering at Trivago for eight years, where he led a team of around 150 employees. With his department, Kolitz successfully managed and scaled the website of the hotel portal and scaled it many times over. He received his doctorate in the area of electronic markets from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.