DevOps/Platform & AI Engineer
Julius C. Gnädig
I have been working with generative AI every day since 2022 and with my own AI workflows since 2023. My professional background is platform and operations: Kubernetes, messaging and automation. Today I bring AI into systems and teams so that it runs securely, affordably and traceably, with governance and data sovereignty as the foundation.
Background
- since 2026
- Owner, Ahnenhain Systems. AI automation, platform and data, AI adoption in teams.
- since 2026
- AI Champion in a company-wide network. Custom AI tooling for my department and other teams, enabling colleagues according to their level, knowledge transfer on data governance and AI-assisted engineering.
- since 2026
- Technical responsibility in a self-service platform project: architecture decisions and guidelines, a custom Crossplane provider in Go, validation with Kyverno and CEL, integration and BDD tests.
- since 2023
- Cloud Engineer. Kubernetes platforms, messaging and streaming with Kafka, Confluent, RabbitMQ and IBM MQ, automation with Ansible and AWX, upgrades, monitoring and operations.
- 2020 to 2023
- Apprenticeship as IT Specialist for System Integration (Fachinformatiker für Systemintegration). Chamber of Commerce (IHK) qualification 2023, vocational school grade 1.7.
From my day-to-day work
- Self-service for platform resources on Kubernetes, from the target picture through architecture to tests and rollout.
- Operating and upgrading Kafka on Kubernetes, automated with Ansible and AWX.
- Tools for AI-assisted development: custom agent skills, MCP integrations and documentation generated by AI and approved by a human.
- Guardrails for AI agents: tool approvals, sandboxing, dry runs, confidentiality classes and human oversight.
- Workshops, live demos and one-to-one sessions so that teams use AI productively and responsibly.
Tools
- AI
- AI agents, agent skills, Model Context Protocol, context engineering, prompt engineering, AI governance, human in the loop, AI cost optimisation
- Automation
- n8n, workflow design, messenger bots, webhooks, Python, Bash
- Platform
- Kubernetes, Crossplane, Kyverno, Helm, Kustomize, Docker, Podman, Ansible, AWX, GitHub Actions, GitOps
- Data
- PostgreSQL, pgvector, Kafka, Confluent, data pipelines, data analysis
- Security
- RBAC, OIDC, Workload Identity Federation, secrets management, mail security with SPF, DKIM and DMARC
- Languages
- Go, Python, Bash, SQL, YAML; basics in Java and C#
Education and training
- IT Specialist for System Integration, IHK, 2023
- Kubernetes for Service Providers, 2024
- Ansible Advanced, orchestration in depth, 2022
- Cambridge First Certificate in English
Languages: German (native), English (fluent, bilingual school track)