Cloud & GenAIPlatform Engineer

I've been building things with computers for more than 25 years — from databases and networks to cloud platforms and GenAI. Today, I work at the intersection of Software Architecture, Cloud Architecture, GenAI and Consulting, but I've always stayed close to the technology itself. Much of my career has been spent understanding how systems work from the inside out, building them, breaking them, fixing them and making them reliable enough to run in production. That experience shapes how I approach architecture today: the decisions I make have to work in the real world — secure, reliable and economical at scale, not just look good on a slide.

My career has taken me across four international cities, beginning in Hamburg, where I built my technical foundation. I studied computer science and started my career working close to the systems themselves, moving through roles in web development, networking and system administration. Those early years gave me something that has stayed with me ever since: a curiosity about how things work and a preference for learning by doing.

From Hamburg, my path took me to London, where I moved deeper into the world of international IT and financial technology. Working with market-data systems and technology used by banks and financial institutions gave me a first-hand understanding of what it means to build and support systems where reliability, security and precision are not optional. It was also a period in which I continued to move between technology and the people and businesses depending on it — a combination that would later become an important part of my work as an architect and consultant.

Geneva became the next chapter. There, my work expanded beyond purely technical roles into business and account management, while I continued to stay closely connected to technology and software. I worked with financial services and corporate clients, translating complex requirements into practical technical solutions. Outside of work, Geneva also gave me the opportunity to pursue some of the things that keep me grounded — wakesurfing in summer and snowboarding in winter. Both have taught me a useful lesson that applies equally well to technology: you learn by doing, you adapt quickly, and sometimes you have to be comfortable being outside your comfort zone.

For the past several years, Zurich has been both my professional base and home. Here, my work has increasingly focused on cloud architecture, platform engineering and digital transformation, working across AWS, GCP and Azure and increasingly into Generative AI. Today, I build the platforms and infrastructure that AI applications run on — from cloud landing zones, Kubernetes and Infrastructure as Code to AI platforms, agentic workflows, RAG and MCP. The technology keeps changing, but the underlying principle hasn't: understand the problem, build something useful, and make it work reliably in the real world.

That same mindset extends beyond client work. After more than twenty-five years of building systems, one habit has stayed with me: when the tool I need doesn't exist, I build it. This has led to a number of personal and open-source projects, including Voice, a text-to-speech reader for Obsidian that is now used by tens of thousands of people, as well as projects such as Git History and an end-to-end encrypted CouchDB sync solution. All of these projects are publicly available and MIT-licensed. Building, shipping and supporting software that people actually rely on keeps me grounded as an architect: what I design has to work in production, not just look good on a slide.

That proximity to technology and AI also led somewhere I hadn't originally expected: writing a novel. Smart Glasses: Is It a Mistake? is a short piece of urban Reality Sci-Fi about an IT consultant in Zurich who buys a pair of AR glasses that quietly start finishing his sentences — until he is no longer sure which thoughts are still his own. I wrote it partly as an experiment and partly as a bridge: a way to explore AI from a perspective that goes beyond architecture diagrams, technical papers and product presentations, and to ask what happens when technology becomes so integrated into our lives that we stop noticing its influence.

That is the perspective I bring to my work today: decades of hands-on experience, a constant curiosity about what comes next, and a belief that the best way to understand technology is still to build with it.