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I like building things that make people's lives a little easier.

Freelance engineer from Hamburg, working with teams mostly on AI and cloud systems.

  • 7+Years of client work
  • 14Projects delivered
  • 8Systems in production

My Clients

  • Mercedes-Benz
  • Vodafone
  • Hapag-Lloyd
  • Merck

Selected work

A few things I’ve worked on with clients.

2026 – present

dmTECH · Solution Architect, AI Governance & IAM

Enterprise Access & Governance for AI Agents

Problem

As AI agents start working across teams and systems, dm needs to know who owns them, what they can do, and how their access and actions are reviewed.

Approach

Designed a company-wide architecture connecting agent platforms with existing and future identity services, plus a central policy layer that can allow, block, or escalate sensitive actions.

Outcome

Gives teams one shared foundation for managing agent access, approvals, and audit across platforms, instead of solving the same governance problem for every new use case.

2025 – 2026

Mercedes-Benz Tech Innovation · Lead Engineer & Solution Architect

Enterprise AI Platform & Agent Gateway

Problem

Internal teams needed a reliable way to build and operate their own generative AI and agent-based applications.

Approach

Led seven engineers in a 13-person team to build a serverless AWS backend and agent gateway, integrating internal platforms across AWS, Azure, and GCP.

Outcome

Gave internal teams a shared foundation for shipping generative AI and agent-based applications.

2020

Hapag-Lloyd · Data Scientist

NLP Automation for Email Processing

Problem

Incoming email across global logistics workflows needed to be classified reliably at high volume.

Approach

Built and deployed BERT-based classification services using AWS Lambda, ECS, API Gateway, and DynamoDB.

Outcome

The system processes more than 190,000 emails each month in production. The work received 2nd place in WirtschaftsWoche Best of Consulting 2020, Technology, with Ginkgo.

View all client projects

Testimonials

Words from people I've worked with.

His combination of strong cloud expertise and practical AI engineering made him instrumental in building the foundation for scalable agent-based applications within our organization.

Lukas Karge

Manager, AI Platforms & Developer Productivity
Mercedes-Benz Tech Innovation

View on LinkedIn
Thanks to Sebastian's talent and strong commitment, the PoCs were the major driver for Hapag-Lloyd to embark on an AI journey.

Adrian Baetu

Head of AI
Hapag-Lloyd

View on LinkedIn
Truly enjoyed capturing user stories with you and that you weren't afraid to deep-dive into scikit-learn based ML models.

Daniel Kuhn

Director, Head of AI & New Technologies
Merck Group

View on LinkedIn

Reference architectures

A few systems, drawn the way I actually build them.

Choose a shipped system to see what it does and why it is built that way.

Serverless goal tracker with GPT-powered motivational push notifications.

Scales to zero

Lambdas fire on API calls and EventBridge schedules. No Kubernetes, nothing always-on, so idle time simply costs nothing.

Costs a few dollars a month

Infrastructure runs at about $2/mo for up to 15k active users. The only variable cost is the OpenAI call behind each message.

Reproducible by default

The whole stack is built as AWS CDK code, deployed from CI, so it can be torn down and rebuilt identically within minutes.

Side projects

I also like making small useful things.

I tend to have more ideas than free time, but a few still make it into the world.

Hello Menu

QR-based digital menu platform helping restaurants replace physical menus.

Benefits: No printing costs, Real-time updates, Mobile-friendly menus.

Visit website

Leap, AI Motivation App

A mobile app that helps people stay focused on their goals through daily, personalized positive AI notifications.

Benefits: Daily positive reminders, Personalized AI notifications, Consistent progress toward goals.

View on App Store

Income Tax Calculator

Interactive tax calculator web app.

Demonstrates: Modern web UI, Data-driven applications, NextJS frontend architecture.

Try it out

Algorithmic Trading Bot

Public performance dashboard for a personal algorithmic trading system.

Demonstrates: Live performance reporting, Risk and drawdown metrics, Read-only operations dashboard.

View dashboard

Chess Oracle

Play Stockfish with thoughtful, level-scaled coaching after every move.

How it works: Stockfish analysis, Deterministic theme detection, Level-scaled AI coaching.

Play Chess Oracle

Delivery approach

How I work

Expect clear communication, honest advice, and close collaboration throughout.

Understand

Align on the business goals, user needs, constraints, and measures of success before choosing the tech stack.

Design

Design a clear, modular, and maintainable architecture that stays easy to extend as requirements evolve, guided by proven engineering principles like the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

Build and ship

Deliver a secure, reliable, scalable, and enterprise-ready system in clear, usable increments, with relevant compliance requirements, automated testing, repeatable deployments, and observability built in from the start.

Make it yours

Leave your team with clear documentation, practical runbooks, and the knowledge to confidently operate, maintain, and extend the system.

Contact

Send me themessy version.

Whether it's an early idea or a half-built system, tell me what you're working on. I usually reply within a day.

info@sebastiannichtern.com

No form, no funnel. Just email.