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Senior AI Platform Engineer

Production AI, Data Platforms & Brownfield Systems

I build production AI, data, and workflow platforms for complex enterprise systems. My work spans data platforms, architecture for agentic AI workflows, retrieval systems with source attribution, evaluation criteria, workflow automation, and multi-tenant infrastructure on Kubernetes.

Platform + AI IC | M.Sc. RWTH Aachen | DACH | Europe | Remote

Thorsten Born

THORSTEN BORN

About Me

My strongest fit is senior individual-contributor work where AI, data, and platform engineering meet. Since 2020, I have shipped enterprise AI and data systems in insurance, IoT, and AI-native products. Before that, my foundation was embedded systems, high-performance computing, and production software engineering.

My engineering path started early: in high school, I designed the electronic control system for a patented fire simulation device, from PCB design to Windows GUI. That full-stack mindset still guides my work today. At HDI and EdgeIQ, I modernized legacy platforms and integrated AI into business-critical workflows: document automation, handwriting recognition, Node-RED workflow runtimes, Kubernetes controllers, and observable data platforms. With an M.Sc. from RWTH Aachen and a background in probabilistic modeling, I build systems that handle uncertainty and hold up in production.

What sets me apart: I care about operating boundaries as much as features. I have worked on architecture for agentic AI patterns, retrieval systems with source attribution, workflow runtimes, Kubernetes controllers, and observability patterns where teams need to understand not only what the system does, but how it fails and how to recover.

I am primarily looking for full-time Senior AI Platform Engineer roles where I can own production systems end to end: architecture, implementation, evaluation, data flows, infrastructure, and handover to teams that have to operate the result.

Based in Germany. German native, English fluent. Open to DACH, European, and compatible global remote roles, with consulting or advisory work as a secondary path when there is a strong technical fit.

Experience & Credentials

A career arc from embedded and HPC systems to enterprise AI, data platforms, and production workflow infrastructure.

Work
Projects
Education
2025
2025 - Present

AI Engineer & Architecture Consultant

Independent

  • Deliver architecture advisory for enterprise AI/ML and IoT initiatives, translating established workflows into target architectures and rollout plans
  • Design and facilitate enterprise AI workshops that turn LLM and retrieval use cases into evaluation criteria, guardrail requirements, and measurable adoption plans
  • Cover agentic workflow patterns, Node-RED, Kubernetes, observability, human review boundaries, and operational handover
2023 - 2025

Senior Data Architect

EdgeIQ

  • Owned architecture and hands-on delivery for a multi-tenant enterprise IoT workflow platform, reducing customer onboarding time by 70% through reusable workflow and integration patterns across 100+ custom Node-RED nodes
  • Designed Generic Timeseries API (Go/TimescaleDB), replacing 5+ specific endpoints and cutting dashboard delivery from weeks to hours
  • Automated multi-tenant Kubernetes provisioning, eliminating an estimated 40+ hours/month of manual DevOps with 1-second reconciliation
2023 - Present

Founder & Lead Developer (Side Project)

Zeitgaist

  • Started immediately after ChatGPT's first public launch as a Perplexity-like real-time RAG answer engine while mainstream assistants were still knowledge-cutoff-limited
  • Built dense retrieval with Sentence Transformers and cross-encoder reranking across 6 social platforms
  • Implemented cross-lingual search supporting 20+ languages with automatic query translation
2021 - 2023

Co-founder & Lead Developer (Startup)

Foretale

  • Co-founded no-code trading platform with visual workflow automation for cryptocurrency strategies
  • Built distributed ML backend (FastAPI/Ray/PyTorch) for real-time sentiment analysis and OCR
  • Created custom Node-RED fork with 25+ trading nodes and Svelte-based UI components
2020 - 2022

Data Scientist & Data Engineer

HDI (Talanx Group)

  • Led development of a German-language NLP pipeline automating >95% of bank-data change email requests and saving an estimated 200+ analyst hours/month
  • Integrated Planet AI handwriting recognition and validation workflows processing 15,000+ forms/month, reducing manual transcription in insurance document operations
  • Built Python/PySpark ETL bridges from HDI's enterprise Data Warehouse and legacy insurance systems into reusable analytics workflows
2019 - 2022

Consultant & Developer (part-time)

TurnDigital GbR -- IT Consulting

  • Delivered ML forecasting and AWS infrastructure modernization for SMB clients, contributing to reported reductions of 15% in inventory costs and 30% in cloud costs
2018 - 2020

Master of Science in Electrical Engineering, IT, and Computer Engineering

RWTH Aachen University

  • Focus on Machine Learning, Embedded Systems, and High Performance Computing
  • Developed a hybrid EA+RL framework combining behavior trees for instinctive behavior with Q-learning, PPO, and DQN for learned behavior
  • Thesis: "Evolving Behavior Trees for Reinforcement Learning on Medical Databases" (Grade: 1.0, best possible German grade)
2017 - 2018

Software Engineering Intern

Silexica GmbH -- later acquired by Xilinx, now AMD

  • Built Yocto/BitBake integration for SLX Tools across 6 target architectures, enabling analysis of embedded Linux applications for automatic parallelization
  • Analyzed an AUTOSAR Adaptive autonomous-driving workload and identified an analyzer-estimated 8x theoretical speedup ceiling on an 8-core platform
  • Supported 6 processor architectures (ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, x86) for cross-platform analysis
2014 - 2017

Working Student -- R&D

Lumileds Germany GmbH (formerly Philips)

  • Conducted hardware measurements and stress testing for automotive LED products and developed firmware optimizations
2013 - 2018

Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering, IT, and Computer Engineering

RWTH Aachen University

  • Focus on Computer Engineering, High Performance Computing, and Digital Systems
  • Implemented an SHM-LXC pscom plugin for Parastation MPI, enabling shared-memory communication between containerized HPC nodes
  • Thesis: "Implementation of a Light-weight Software Layer for Inter-process Communication" (Grade: 1.3, second-best possible German grade)
Summer 2007

Engineering Intern

Halfkann + Kirchner

  • Designed electronic control system for patented fire simulation device (DE102008011567B4)
  • Built custom PCB and programmed ATmega microcontroller in C/Assembler
  • Created Windows GUI enabling engineers to draw custom fire progression curves

Featured Projects

Selected engineering work that shows platform ownership, production constraints, and applied AI/data systems beyond prototypes.

Selected Writing

Practical notes on production AI, agent governance, career risk, and the engineering judgment behind systems that need to work after the demo.

Read Agentic Engineering Without Chaos
technical Part 2

Agentic Engineering Without Chaos

Coding agents make output cheap. Production teams still need proof, scoped changes, dependency hygiene, review discipline, and rollback paths.

March 30, 2026
aisoftware-engineeringcoding-agents +2
Read From AI Prototypes to Governed Agents
guide Part 1

From AI Prototypes to Governed Agents

AI prototypes are easy now. Production agents still need architecture, policy boundaries, verification, observability, and accountable rollout.

March 29, 2026
aienterprise-architectureagents +2