Career

The operator

I started at nineteen as a Java intern and stayed because the interesting problems were one layer down, in the infrastructure. By the end I was head of operations: data centre, high availability, monitoring, and the move from Subversion to Git before that was fashionable.

The job that changed my career was leading the migration of an on-premises SaaS platform into the public cloud, from market analysis through planning to execution. I learned that the hard part of infrastructure is rarely technical.

The advisor

At Swisscom I became the technical contact for Swiss banks and insurers, including a major reinsurer, across cloud and platform services. Six years of sitting on the customer side of the table in one of the most heavily regulated markets in Europe.

The work I cared about was sovereignty: how an insurer reduces its dependency on American hyperscalers, what a sovereign architecture really costs, and how you get a critical workload back out again if the regulator, or the politics, change. I also supported the technical evaluation behind a cloud startup acquisition.

The builder

Advising is comfortable. Building is not. I co-founded hoggo, a GDPR and vendor risk SaaS, as CTO, part time at first while still at Swisscom, then fully. I led four engineers and stayed hands-on: retrieval-augmented pipelines and multi-prompt chains in LangChain4j against OpenAI and Gemini, with evaluation built in, because compliance customers do not forgive a confident wrong answer.

I also did the work founders cannot delegate. I closed our first enterprise client myself, from first contact through technical discovery to signature, built the first three partnerships with legaltech advisors, and led the technical responses when acquirers came to look.

The lecturer

Alongside all of that I taught Linux fundamentals, system administration and operating system concepts to computer science undergraduates. Explaining a kernel to a lecture hall is the fastest way to find out what you only think you understand.

Now

I work independently from London. Buyer-side technical due diligence for EdTech acquisitions, judging architecture, team capability and the risks nobody put in the data room. Founder-led sales advisory for startups. And building: most recently a client prospecting tool on Google Cloud, written with an AI coding agent under a test-first workflow, because I would rather know from experience than from a conference talk.

What I am looking for is the overlap of the three acts: senior AI consulting where enterprise reality meets LLM systems. Regulated clients, real constraints, production rather than pilots.