Tobias Lohse
I’ve been working as generalist software engineer for over 10 years, turning AI capabilities into production systems. I enjoy architecting pragmatic solutions, designing thoughtful user experiences, and enabling nimble teams to ship and maintain high-quality systems. My biggest passion is learning new things, which has lead me to often work at the intersection of teams and across the full stack of software from ML models and agentic AI systems to data intensive backend systems and web and mobile apps.
Experience
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- Sep 2025 – Present · 8 months
Head of Engineering
- Sep 2023 – Sep 2025 · 2 years
Founding Engineer
In my latest role, I helped build a startup that makes machine learning models more transparent. We built an MLOps platform for retrieval-augmented classification models that achieved millisecond inference and gives full traceability of predictions to the training data that drives them. This enabled new approaches to data-centric online learning and training data optimization. In the process I learned a lot about embedding models, data-intensive backend systems, and how to build reliable agentic AI features.
- Led 5 engineers building an MLOps platform for retrieval-augmented classifiers with millisecond inference and data-centric online learning through memory updates.
- Engineered pipeline for GPU-optimized fine-tuning of embedding models with custom contrastive losses, distributed gradient caching, and automatic batch size tuning.
- Prototyped PyTorch harness for shaping embedding-space decision boundaries with 1000x faster feedback.
- Fine-tuned LLMs for embedding-guided synthetic data generation.
- Implemented Next.js app for statistical analysis, synthetic data generation, and visualization of model context usage, including an AI copilot that can take actions.
- Shipped enterprise-grade multi-tenant auth including SSO, SCIM, and audit logs.
- Drove SOC2 compliance, reducing overhead with CI for vulnerability mitigations and release tracking.
- Built agent-native SDLC platform with eval harness and a compounding skill library.
- Established on-call processes and full-stack observability with distributed OpenTelemetry tracing.
- Unified release pipeline for cloud GKE and on-prem deployments with E2E gates.
- Shipped Postgres-backed background job queue and zero-downtime data migrations.
- Designed Python SDK and docs to guide developers from quickstart to production.
I lead a team pairing satellite imagery with soil modeling to identify farmers with high potential for extending sustainable agricultural practices, helping grow enrollments in our carbon credit programs by 80%. Alongside the product work I spent a lot of energy coaching engineers and shaping architecture across a mature engineering organization.
- Managed 2 Scrum teams with 7 engineers building tools that paired satellite imagery with soil modeling to target high-potential farmers, driving 80% growth in carbon credit enrollments.
- Coached 2 engineers to promotion by empowering them to lead projects and platform initiatives.
- Ran book clubs on system architecture and Domain-Driven Design that evolved architecture org-wide, and organized Event Storming workshops to evolve our monolithic backend into well-designed services.
- Led company-wide full-stack chapter, organized 80-person on-site, and improved on-call processes across 5 teams.
- Feb 2021 – Apr 2022 · 1 year 2 months
Associate Director
- Sep 2020 – Feb 2021 · 5 months
Principal Engineer/Manager
I built out and managed a team of 20 engineers to launch a new diabetes management platform for 330k patients worldwide. In the process I had a chance to automate regulatory filings from our integration tests, establish new project management processes, and restructure the 60-person department into cross-functional teams.
- Led project to launch a HIPAA and GDPR-compliant diabetes management platform for 330k patients and doctors worldwide.
- Scaled frontend team to 20 by hiring 3 managers, 1 architect, and 7 engineers, and restructured 60 contributors into agile cross-functional teams.
- Automated generation of regulatory IEC 62304 filings for Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) from Gherkin tests in CI.
- Helped evolve microservices towards Domain-Driven Design to handle millions of transactions per hour (Kubernetes, Service Bus).
- Developed a competency matrix and performance review system, rolling it out with 10 managers.
- Drove launch of new diabetes management platform to the finish line within 4 months by realigning stakeholders on an MVP and focusing on integration testing.
- Kickstarted a company-wide design system, aligning desktop, iOS, Android, and web clients with backend services via React Native and a GraphQL Gateway.
I co-founded a startup to make movie marketing more data-driven. We built white-label loyalty apps for a handful of German cinemas, including the largest chain, which grew to 200k monthly active users at a 4.7 App Store rating. Than we used the data to personalize marketing campaigns leading to real ROI for cinemas.
- Co-founded and led engineering for a startup providing data-driven marketing through white-label cinema loyalty apps, serving 25+ independent cinemas and the largest German cinema chain. Raised $1M Series A.
- Headed implementation of a new app with 200k MAUs and 4.7 average App Store rating, integrating with existing authentication, CMS, and POS systems.
- Led implementation of React Native apps, web dashboards, Node.js GraphQL services, design system, and CI/CD pipelines (PostgreSQL, Redis, AWS Lambda).
- Oversaw Python movie recommendation engine that drove 20% ticket sales increases from personalized notifications.
- Hired and led a remote-first team of 4 engineers and championed Holacracy and OKRs to distribute authority.
Fresh out of college, I worked at a small ML startup, building an NLP call-routing system using TF-IDF, Word2Vec, and random forests.
Web Developer & Designer
Freelance (Berlin, Germany)
I started my journey into software development by building websites and mobile apps for various clients.
Education
I studied physics, philosophy, and computer science writing one bachelor thesis in the area of quantum computing and the other one about the turing test. But then decided that academia was not for me and got into startup life.
Endorsements
View on LinkedInSkills
As an ex-founder and someone who loves to learn, I find that I provide the most value when I'm able to work on systems holistically and be hands-on across the stack driven by the business's current top priorities.
I’m drawn to AI where it actually meets the product rather than sitting beside it. Building something useful and steerable means understanding the data, embeddings, model behavior, and product context well enough to make good systems decisions. I like pulling ideas from research when they help solve real product problems, but most of the leverage still lives in the data: labeling, feedback loops, evaluation, and steerability. My work at Orca also made me especially interested in memory: how systems should remember, compress, retrieve, and apply context over time, and how much product potential still sits between today’s LLM context windows and the way people actually work.
I like backend systems that are simple enough to understand, observable enough to learn from, and well-modeled enough to evolve. Monolith versus microservices is mostly the wrong argument. What matters is whether you have clear domain boundaries and whether telemetry shows that the product, team, or scale now needs a more specialized architecture. Domain-Driven Design shapes how I approach that: model the business domain first, keep it separate from infrastructure, and use adapters or repositories where they make the system easier to change underneath. Kubernetes, serverless, and managed cloud services all have their place, but I prefer starting with simpler open source primitives and letting the system earn complexity.
I came to software partly through design, and I still care a lot about the feel of what I build. Good apps should feel native to their platform, not just technically correct, which means using the product and sweating the gestures, interaction states, and details automated tests never catch. I’d rather build product-specific UI on headless primitives than inherit the look of a heavy component library, and I’ve been building design systems, including hybrid ones across web and mobile, for years. I like React’s co-location model because it matches how I think about product architecture: features should own their data, behavior, and UI instead of being sliced into rigid layers.
I like leading close to the work. At Tandem, I hired and managed larger teams and coordinated work across a broader matrixed organization. At Orca, starting as an IC before moving into Head of Engineering made my leadership much more grounded, because it is hard to lead well on a system you do not understand. I care about distributed authority: clear roles, explicit ownership, and enough trust that capable people can make decisions without routing everything through one person. I still believe in Agile as originally written: adapt through real feedback, keep people close to the work, and never let process harden into ritual. I’d rather build smaller, sharper teams than add structure around avoidable complexity.
Open Source
I'm a big believer in open source, and contribute fixes and improvements back to libraries when I can, like a recent fix for a batch-sampling regression in SentenceTransformers. I've also open-sourced a few tools myself: a fully typed CSS in JS library for React Native, a CLI for generating typed HTTPX clients from OpenAPI specs in Python, and a (still unreleased) event-sourcing framework for offline-first state synchronization.
Outside Work
I’m originally from Berlin, have lived in Chile and Kenya, and now call Chicago home. When the laptop closes, you’ll find me mixing cocktails, cooking, exploring art, or chasing adventures with my two little daughters.
I've held positions on the boards of peace and social-justice organizations and churches since I was a teenager and co-founded a reforestation initiative in Kenya together with local youth.
I’m always happy to chat, swap ideas, or take on the occasional consulting project. Don't hesitate to get in touch!