One person, every layer

Owning every layer of a system is the fastest way I know to learn where the real costs are: the encryption scheme that is correct but unusable, the abstraction that saves ten lines and hides a race, the install step that quietly loses half the people who were going to try it.

A game client and a voice agent look nothing alike until you are inside them: both are real-time systems where something arrives on a socket, has to be understood before the next frame or the next word, and where being late is indistinguishable from being wrong. Working across C++, Rust, TypeScript and Python means I pick the language the problem wants rather than the one I already know.

Machine learning is part of the work and not the point of it. I care about what happens when a model has to answer inside a latency budget, on hardware somebody else owns, with a person on the other end who notices immediately when it is wrong. Those are systems problems before they are modelling ones.

I run Phonity Labs e.U. in Vienna, the legal entity behind the client work and the products. Not all of it has been solo: at IT-Technik Klimt I led AI automation projects and the cross-functional teams that put those tools in front of people who had not asked for them, and at RISE I worked on configuration management and deployment across distributed infrastructure.

My job titles and my engineering do not share a start date. I spent years in operations roles before software was what it said on the contract, and through four of those years I was also lead PvE developer on Turtle WoW - writing encounters and rebuilding raid content the server core had never implemented correctly - on a server that went from thirty concurrent players to a peak above two hundred thousand. The title caught up in 2023. The work did not start there, and the case studies on this site are where you can check that.

A team doing this at a scale where the interesting problems are not ones I can hold in my head.