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Senior AI/ML 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, agentic AI workflows, retrieval and evaluation systems, 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 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/ML 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
Education
2025
2025 - Present

AI Engineer & Architecture Consultant

Independent

  • 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
2023 - 2025

Senior Data Architect

EdgeIQ

  • 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
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 retrieval pipeline 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)

  • 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
2019 - 2022 (Part-time)

Consultant & Developer

TurnDigital

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

  • 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
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

Electronic Control System Developer (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

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