Nico A.-Founding / Principal Engineer | AI Infrastructure, Orchestration & Distributed Systems
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Experience
Core Engineer - Infrastructure Orchestration & Developer Tools
Platform Engineering Labs Inc. / formae
- Built core parts of formae's infrastructure engine and cloud integrations in Go, managing resource lifecycles across cloud and Kubernetes environments.
- Designed and implemented an extensible plugin architecture and SDK for integrating infrastructure providers and resources, including AWS, Kubernetes and Helm.
- Built agent-native infrastructure workflows exposing formae through MCP to tools including Claude Code, Codex and Cursor.
- Worked directly with prospective customers on technical evaluations, implementation design and migration paths from existing infrastructure workflows to formae.
- Helped evolve formae through its open-source, multi-cloud and cloud platform releases, with a focus on reliable infrastructure orchestration and developer experience.
Founding Engineer
InsureVision.ai
- First technical hire at an AI startup building computer-vision technology for accident prevention and insurance risk assessment.
- Built the initial production platform, ML infrastructure and deployment workflows from the ground up.
- Developed production ML systems using vision transformers and driver embeddings, working directly with the founders on product and technical strategy.
- Built the technical foundation during the period leading up to the company's $2.7M seed round.
Freelance ML Systems Engineer
AskUI GmbH
- Designed a cross-platform architecture for local ML inference and training across Windows, Linux and macOS.
- Integrated the approach into AskUI's library and dependency-management stack and built an OCR-based proof of concept.
Principal Engineer - AI Platform & Infrastructure (promoted from Senior MLOps Engineer)
Oxolo GmbH
Built and scaled core parts of Oxolo's generative AI video platform as the company grew from an early-stage product into a €13M Series A startup.
- Built the cloud platform, APIs, AI services and distributed job-scheduling infrastructure powering production generative-video workloads.
- Owned major architecture and scalability initiatives; established MLOps and platform practices used by 20+ engineers and led a three-person DevOps/MLOps team.
- Introduced platform and deployment practices that reduced the product delivery cycle from approximately 18 months to 8 weeks.
- Joined initially as Senior MLOps Engineer to productionize the earlier vime.ai platform, define the technical stack and build the first production cloud and ML infrastructure.
Head of AI
Certainly.io
- Led a five-person AI and data engineering team building production NLP systems for conversational commerce.
- Built multilingual intent classification, entity recognition and intent-mining systems across European languages.
- Developed internal ML/data tooling that contributed to retaining more than €700k in ARR and introduced infrastructure-as-code and production ML practices.
Independent Software & AI Consultant
- Independent software engineering and consulting for startups, e-commerce and consumer technology companies.
- Built cloud-native applications, backend systems and production infrastructure; designed scalable cloud architectures across AWS and GCP.
- Worked directly with engineering and business stakeholders across AI/ML systems, MLOps, developer tooling and production software architecture.
Senior Cloud & Machine Learning Engineer
codecentric AG
- Built production ML and cloud systems for customers across energy, finance and telecommunications, taking data-science prototypes through to production.
- Helped establish ML-in-production as a consulting offering, delivered technical workshops and contributed to customer engagements with more than €500k in project volume.
- Worked across Python, Go, Terraform and multi-cloud infrastructure on AWS, Azure and GCP.
Head of Engineering - Early-stage startup
emr.ai
- Built and operated a cloud-native medical speech-recognition platform and led a four-person backend and AI engineering team.
- Migrated a monolithic C++/Qt backend to fault-tolerant distributed cloud services, scaling processing to more than 10,000 audio hours per day while reducing infrastructure cost by more than 90%.
Industry experience
See where this freelancer has spent most of their professional time.
Experienced in Information Technology, Retail, Healthcare, Energy, Banking and Finance, and Telecommunication.
Business area experience
See which departments and functions this freelancer has contributed to most.
Experienced in Information Technology and Product Development.
Summary
Founding and principal-level software engineer with 10+ years of experience building production AI infrastructure, orchestration systems and cloud platforms. Strong background in Go, Python, Kubernetes, distributed systems and production ML, with hands-on experience taking infrastructure products from 0-to-1. Most recently building formae, an infrastructure-as-code platform spanning cloud resource orchestration, provider integrations, Kubernetes, plugins and agent-native workflows via MCP.
Skills
- Go
- Python
- Kubernetes
- Aws
- Gcp
- Terraform
- Docker
- Distributed Systems
- Infrastructure Orchestration
- Scheduling
- Ai/Ml Infrastructure
- Production Inference
- Infrastructure As Code
- Developer Tools
- Mcp / Agent Tooling
Languages
Education
Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University (DHBW Karlsruhe)
B.Sc., Research focus on automatic speech recognition and NLP · Applied Computer Science · Karlsruhe, Germany
Statistics
Experience
Global experience
Expertise
Qualifications
Profile
Frequently asked questions
Have questions? Find more information here.
Nico is based in Berlin, Germany.
Nico speaks the following languages: German (Native), English (Advanced).
Nico has at least 9 years of experience. During this time, Nico has worked in at least 8 different roles and for 7 different companies. The average length of individual experience is 1 year and 2 months. Note that Nico may not have shared all experience and actually has more experience.
Based on recent experience, Nico would be well-suited for roles such as: Core Engineer - Infrastructure Orchestration & Developer Tools, Founding Engineer, Freelance ML Systems Engineer.
Nico's most recent position is Core Engineer - Infrastructure Orchestration & Developer Tools at Platform Engineering Labs Inc. / formae.
In recent years, Nico has worked for Platform Engineering Labs Inc. / formae, InsureVision.ai, AskUI GmbH, Oxolo GmbH, and Certainly.io.
Nico is most experienced in industries like Information Technology, Retail, and Healthcare. Nico also has some experience in Energy, Banking and Finance, and Telecommunication.
Nico is most experienced in business areas like Information Technology and Product Development.
Nico has recently worked in industries like Information Technology, Retail, and Insurance.
Nico has recently worked in business areas like Information Technology and Product Development.
Nico holds a Bachelor in Applied Computer Science from Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University (DHBW Karlsruhe).
The availability of Nico needs to be confirmed.
Daily rate distribution
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Average rates for similar positions
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The average daily rate is the mean of all daily rates from recent contracts of comparable freelancers on our platform.
The median daily rate is the middle value of all daily rates — half of comparable freelancers charge less, half charge more. Unlike the average, it is barely affected by outliers.
Calculated based on our freelancers’ daily rates as of 6 Oct 2026. Actual rates may vary depending on seniority level, experience, skill specialization, project complexity, and engagement length.
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