I grew up in Schweinfurt, Germany and co-founded a web consulting company at the age of 15. I received a Dipl.-Ing. Univ. degree (equivalent to M.Sc.), and a B.Sc. from the Technische Universität München (TUM) with a major in Information and Communication Technology. My thesis focused on using machine learning and natural language processing to estimate the sentiment of movie reviews. I continued my research after graduation, which led to multiple publications, including an article in the IEEE Intelligent Systems Journal. For my Bachelor’s thesis I built an augmented reality video conferencing system and performed a usability study. Most of the classes I took were related to human computer interaction and security.
In 2006, I attended the International Graduate Seminar on Smart Homes at the American University of Beirut (AUB) in Lebanon and returned six months later to spend a whole semester at AUB.
After graduating in 2009 I moved to San Francisco and took a job as Lead Software Architect at Pingsta, a startup that is building a collaborative platform for the world’s Internet network experts. My second job was as Tech Lead at Airbnb, a startup that pioneered the Sharing Economy. I designed Airbnb’s microservice architecture, served as tech lead, and scaled the site to millions of users in 192 countries. Highlights of my work include Airbnb’s custom search engine and fraud detection systems. I left Airbnb in April 2013 to start D2iQ (formerly Mesosphere), one of the pioneering companies in the cloud native space. Today, D2iQ provides the leading independent Kubernetes platform and simplifies and automates the really difficult tasks needed for enterprise Kubernetes in production at scale, reducing operational burden and TCO.
I love traveling, skiing, road and mountain biking, backpacking, and outdoor sports in general. One of my goals in life is to visit all seven continents. Another one is to sail across an ocean. I’m inspired by mastery and perfection. I search for it in music, movies, food, wine, and beautiful objects.
I enjoy making cocktails and collected my favorite recipes on my cocktail website.