Distributed Systems Experts in Berlin

• Building independent projects in the AI/developer tools space.
• Experimenting with product ideas, rapid prototyping, and go-to-market validation.
• Designing AI-native operating model—leveraging agentic pipelines, living context schemas, and rigorous eval harnesses to multiply individual contributor leverage and eliminate implementation bottlenecks.

Working as independent / interim / fractional CTO / engineering director, technical leader, builder, coach. Select achievements:

• Fractional CTO for a music-tech startup. Helped unlock further funding by providing the technical strategy and plan behind their vision and pitch deck, then executed it: vision to a working beta, 0 to 1, on time and on budget against that plan.
• AI automation for a compliance business. An annual research process — days of a person working through spreadsheets and checking websites by hand, so costly it had been abandoned for years — now runs automatically every month and takes about an hour to review. Stale or missing data became current data, twelve times a year.
• An AI development autopilot. Agents take an approved ticket, implement test-first, verify against a running system and open a pull request. An AI committee reviews on various categories and provides risk assessments based on my specs. Nothing merges without a human.
• Coaching and sparring for engineering leaders. Developing engineering managers was most of my job as a director; I now do it one to one.

• Led development of RunBot AI assistant autonomously using LLM-powered workflow automation (React, TypeScript, Java, MongoDB, NATS)
• Architected TMS platform providing unified transportation management and real-time logistics visibility with AI processing pipelines
• Designed event-driven microservices architecture supporting marketplace
• Drove architectural decisions and technical leadership across full-stack platform development

• IT training in theory and practice for IT specialists in application development and system integration

• Mentor team of 6 ML platform engineers through weekly 1:1s, technical design reviews, and best practices, improving team velocity by 35% through structured sprint planning and skill development programs
• Define 2025–2026 ML platform roadmap in collaboration with Data Science, Cloud Engineering, and Product teams, prioritizing automated model governance, cost attribution systems, and multi-environment deployment strategies
• Partner with Data Science, SRE, and Product stakeholders to align ML platform capabilities with business objectives, reducing data scientist deployment friction by 60% through self-service platforms
• Architect and deliver production-grade MLOps platform supporting 50+ models in production with automated promotion pipelines, versioning, and rollback capabilities, achieving 99.5% platform uptime SLA
• Design distributed ML pipeline architecture using Metaflow and Argo Workflows (Vertex Pipelines-compatible), reducing model training time by 30% and deployment cycles from 2 weeks to 3 days through full CI/CD automation
• Build containerized ML services on Kubernetes with auto-scaling policies, resource quotas, and multi-tenancy isolation, optimizing infrastructure costs by $180K annually (25% reduction)
• Implement monitoring, alerting, and performance tracking using Prometheus, Grafana, and custom instrumentation, reducing model debugging time by 50% and establishing model performance SLOs
• Lead development of RAG-based document intelligence platform using LangChain, LangGraph, and vector databases, implementing agentic AI workflows for automated financial document processing
• Implement Infrastructure-as-Code using Terraform for reproducible environment provisioning and GitOps workflows, reducing infrastructure drift incidents by 80%
• Design role-based access control for ML platform, implement model lineage tracking, and establish audit trails for regulatory compliance aligned with enterprise IAM best practices

• 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.

• Bootstrapping a CloudOps team and building a multi-cloud provider backend for a low-code Internal Developer Platform (IDP) with env zero

• Introducing user story mapping, ADRs, milestones, and backlog management

• Designing and developing core APIs, setting up CI/CD pipelines, OpenTofu/Terraform scripts

• Representing and communicating the team with third-party stakeholders (e.g. env zero)

• (Cross-)team coaching on DevOps, software design, Terraform, Golang, and agile practices

Java 21 · Spring Boot 3 · Keycloak · PostgreSQL · Docker · Nginx · GitHub Actions · DigitalOcean · React 18 · TypeScript · Plasmo

• Architected and shipped a production-ready Job Application Tracker end-to-end: REST API with 5-stage workflow, pagination, sorting, and dynamic filtering — full ownership from design to live cloud deployment on DigitalOcean.
• Implemented production-grade identity management: OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect / JWT / RBAC via Keycloak, applying Hexagonal Architecture and DDD principles.
• Built automated CI/CD pipeline (GitHub Actions); containerised with Docker; Nginx reverse proxy with path-based routing and SSL termination.
• Developed a Chrome Extension (Plasmo framework, Manifest V3) that auto-fills job applications directly from LinkedIn into the tracker — demonstrates full product thinking across backend API and browser client.

• Shipped Memorable, a production iOS app using on-device CLIP-based semantic photo search. Owned the full stack: Core ML conversion, local inference pipeline, App Store release, and post-launch iteration.
• Built a practical AI deployment framework that covers workflow redesign, use-case prioritization, system integration, eval planning, and human-in-the-loop controls.
• Conducting AI use-case discovery and advisory conversations with professionals in legal, tax, and real estate sectors.

• Vram.run: Rust, TypeScript, HF Inference API with 19 providers, 220+ HW configs, and 30+ cloud GPUs. Search a model to see which API providers serve it, which GPUs can run it locally (and how fast), and what cloud rental would cost. Or search your hardware and see what fits. Also includes a Rust CLI.
• Psychotron: JavaScript, Web Audio API, AudioWorklet, Canvas 2D. Front-end for flash fiction audiobook with Web Audio DSP chain featuring pitch-shifting, 12-voice chorus, flanger, 13-band EQ, and convolver reverb. Includes a 2D canvas effect morphing engine and synchronized teleprompter.
• RecentWork: Swift, macOS, FSEvents, launchd. macOS daemon that watches project directories and maintains a flat folder of symlinks to recently modified files. Homebrew installable.
• Mini-llm: Bash, macOS, launchd, Ollama, llama.cpp, MLX, Open WebUI. Single command that turns a Mac Mini into a headless AI server.
• ThatSlop: JavaScript. Chrome/Firefox extension for AI content detection on LinkedIn and Twitter.
• Smux: Bash, tmux. Human-friendly tmux wrapper that is Homebrew installable.
• Learn Rust Course: Rust. Course on Rust’s memory model for C++ programmers, written from experience of transitioning from C++ to Rust at Irreducible.

• Working on the next iteration of tonbo to make it the most flexible in-process analytical database in the market that scales and is operated with strong availability

• Introduced object scope cache to the remote storage layer to avoid I/O churn

• Working on refactoring WAL to support remote storage

• Taking care of the health of the systems as well as designing the operational story and bringing them to production

• Technologies: LSM, WAL, Arrow, Parquet, Rust

• Developed a SolidJS frontend UI for a spectrometric water analysis system on an ARM-based embedded Linux platform
• Prototyped UI in TypeScript React/Nx with LitElements and MQTT integration
• Built production UI using SolidJS, SUID, i18next, Ajv, MQTT.js, C3.js
• Refined requirements with UX team and water analysis system engineers
• Defined and documented system architecture, MQTT message formats, frontend architecture, and development setup
• Set up frontend system from scratch, implemented domain-oriented type system, UI components, and application state
• Managed MQTT pub/sub services and schema-based message validation in frontend
• Coached two junior frontend developers
• Worked in an agile remote team using JIRA, Git, and Bitbucket

• Led engineering execution: roadmap planning, capacity alignment, risk management, dependencies, and delivery tracking.
• Consolidated multiple payroll product lines into a unified SaaS platform on Dynamics 365 Business Central, enabling scalable post-merger operations and reducing operational complexity across the portfolio.
• Restructured engineering and product teams in a remote-first setting across Germany, Austria and Poland, consisting of five cross-functional units: compliance/enabling, platform, DevOps and two stream-aligned teams with total FTE depending on phase of reorganisation.
• Rebuilt the mid-level leadership layer and mentored engineering leaders, establishing a leadership pipeline and strengthening architectural decision-making across teams for scalable growth, delivery ownership and predictability.
• Designed platform foundations and system boundaries using Team Topologies aligned structures, enabling scalable ownership, clear interfaces and parallel development across distributed teams.
• Spearheaded AI transformation by implementing AI-assisted SDLC practices using SpecKit and GitHub Actions for automated, executable specifications, while delivering agentic product capabilities by securely exposing platform data and services to AI agents and copilots via RAG-based retrieval pipelines and MCP-style extensions.
• Drove modularisation of tightly coupled legacy logic into independently deployable services, improving maintainability, testability and architectural clarity while preserving continuity through targeted, low-risk extraction rather than full rewrites.
• Established observability, CI/CD and DevOps governance as platform capabilities, increasing automated compliance gates from 25% to 75% and improving deployment cadence by 40% across 15+ product versions.
• Improved operational resilience using DORA-aligned practices (lead time ↓50%, SaaS MTTR ↓85%), strengthening reliability and reducing support overhead.
• Coordinated engineering recovery for the German payroll platform during a company-wide P0 ransomware incident; restored platform continuity within 72h, validated data integrity, and rolled out hardened runbooks and automated recovery playbooks.
• Responsible for budget compliance and cost oversight in Engineering, with limited P&L responsibility and participating in the annual COGS/OPEX/CAPEX planning cycle.