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Senior AI/ML Platform Engineer

Thorsten Born

Germany-based senior individual contributor for production AI, data platforms, brownfield enterprise systems, and observable workflow infrastructure.

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Target roles

Senior AI/ML Platform Engineer, Senior Data/AI Architect

Location

Germany, DACH, Europe, compatible global remote

Languages

German native, English fluent

Profile

I build production AI, data, and workflow platforms for complex systems. My recent work includes data-platform components, agentic AI workflow patterns, real-time retrieval with source attribution, workflow infrastructure, and Kubernetes controllers. I am strongest in roles that need a senior IC who can connect architecture, implementation, data flow, evaluation, and operational handover.

Professional Experience

AI Engineer & Architecture Consultant

Independent

Aachen, Germany | 2025 - Present

  • Provide AI/ML and IoT platform architecture support for brownfield workflow modernization
  • Translate existing systems into production-ready automation designs with Node-RED, Kubernetes, observability, and human review boundaries
  • Design AI/ML workshops covering LLM integration, retrieval systems, agentic architectures, evaluation, guardrails, and rollout planning

Senior Data Architect

EdgeIQ

Remote (US) | 2023 - 2025

  • Architected enterprise IoT workflow and data platform, reducing customer onboarding time by 70% with 100+ custom enterprise Node-RED nodes and AWS Aurora to TimescaleDB migration
  • Designed Generic Timeseries API (Go/TimescaleDB), replacing 5+ specific endpoints and cutting dashboard delivery from weeks to hours
  • Automated multi-tenant Kubernetes provisioning, eliminating 40+ hours/month of manual DevOps with 1-second reconciliation
  • Standardized workflow runtime with 50+ device-lifecycle subflows and per-tenant isolation supporting 1000+ workflow instances
  • Built 10+ React dashboard components with custom hooks for real-time IoT fleet visualization
Related case study EdgeIQ

Founder & Lead Developer (Side Project)

Zeitgaist

Aachen, Germany | 2023 - Present

  • 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 retrieval pipeline with Sentence Transformers and cross-encoder reranking across 6 social platforms
  • Implemented cross-lingual search supporting 20+ languages with automatic query translation
  • Designed real-time WebSocket streaming with MessagePack serialization for AI chat responses
  • Deployed scalable infrastructure on Docker Swarm with Redis caching and OpenTelemetry tracing
Related case study zeitgaist.ai

Co-founder & Lead Developer (Startup)

Foretale

Aachen, Germany | 2021 - 2023

  • 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
  • Designed Kafka-based sensor network processing Twitter/whale/sentiment data 24/7
Related case study foretale.io

Data Scientist & Data Engineer

HDI (Talanx Group)

Cologne, Germany | 2020 - 2022

  • Built German-language NLP pipeline achieving >95% email-processing automation and saving 200+ analyst hours/month
  • Integrated Planet.AI handwriting recognition for straight-through processing of 15,000+ forms/month
  • Built Python/PySpark ETL bridges from HDI's enterprise Data Warehouse and legacy insurance systems into analytics-ready workflows
  • Presented predictive analytics strategy to Life Insurance Board Member (Vorstand)
  • Established ML engineering standards adopted by 3 data science teams / 12+ engineers

Consultant & Developer

TurnDigital

Aachen, Germany | 2019 - 2022 (Part-time)

  • Delivered ML forecasting for SMB clients, reducing inventory costs by 15%
  • Consulted on IT infrastructure modernization, reducing cloud infrastructure costs by 30%

Software Engineering Intern

Silexica

Cologne, Germany | 2017 - 2018

  • Built Yocto layers enabling SLX Tools to analyze embedded applications for parallelization
  • Demonstrated AUTOSAR Adaptive analysis identifying 8x speedup potential on multi-core platforms
  • Supported 6 processor architectures (ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, x86) for cross-platform analysis
Silexica (acquired by AMD)

Electronic Control System Developer (Intern)

Halfkann + Kirchner

Germany | Summer 2007

  • 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
  • Developed DLL driver bridging hardware and software
Related case study Patent

Education

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

RWTH Aachen University

Aachen, Germany | 2018 - 2020

  • 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 (1.0, best possible German grade) Paper

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

RWTH Aachen University

Aachen, Germany | 2013 - 2018

  • 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 (1.3, second-best possible German grade)