I’m a computer scientist and engineering manager based in Zurich. I build databases, distributed systems, and storage. At RelationalAI, I lead the logic engine organization.
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Current work
RelationalAI builds a decision intelligence agent that answers complex enterprise questions grounded in semantic models. The logic engine is the runtime for those models: a cloud-native relational database with reasoning capabilities.
My org and I build this engine from scratch. Our work spans:
- query protocol, transaction lifecycle & control plane, language compilation
- metadata management, transactional semantics, incrementality and IVM
- semantic query optimization, query classification and complex recursion
- vectorized and compiled query execution with worst-case optimal joins
- data structure design, partitioning, scale-out and sorting
- storage management, garbage collection, query caching
The logic engine org has grown to 40 people across multiple teams, so I now spend most of my time on engineering management. Before that, I was the technical lead for our storage layer and implemented the first version of our pager, drawing on ideas from my time at TU Munich's chair for database systems (HyPer, Umbra, LeanStore). Before that, I was an early R&D engineer working across the database stack.
Please reach out if you'd like to learn more.
Prior work
- 2014 – 2020: Co-Founder of the full-stack software consulting firm Clockworks, where we specialized in building data-driven systems using novel computational models such as Differential Dataflow.
- 2019: Master's thesis on "Online Analysis of Distributed Dataflows with Timely Dataflow" at ETH Zurich and TU Munich under the supervision of Prof. Vasiliki Kalavri, Prof. Alfons Kemper and Prof. Timothy Roscoe.
- 2017 – 2019: M.Sc. with Honors in Software Engineering at TU Munich in a joint degree with Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich and Augsburg University. "Geared towards the top 2 percent of students in computer science". Focus on databases, distributed systems, stream processing and dataflow systems.
- 2018: Research Assistant at Oracle Labs Zurich. I worked with Julia Kindelsberger on large graph visualization and exploration for Oracle Data Studio and PGX, a fast, parallel graph analytics framework available as an in-memory and distributed engine.
I enjoy data-centric programming with functional and relational ideas, and building simple and effective programs. Check out my talks and projects!