About me

About me

I am a married father of 2 kids with a strong interest in extreme sports and IT topics.

About my life

It all started in Upper Austria, where I discovered my love for science at the BORG Perg — and for computers. After military service, I landed my first “real” job at Klausner & Troyer Computersysteme in Steyr, where I administered Windows NT servers. I’ve since converted to Linux.

Then I went to the University of Applied Sciences in Wiener Neustadt, where I studied Precision, Systems and Information Technology. For my international internship, I headed to Virginia, USA, to work at ARIN — the organization that hands out IP addresses for all of the Americas. There I built IPv6 firewalls and an IPSec VPN server. After that I returned to Austria and started working at the University of Vienna — as a network engineer at ACOnet (the Austrian research network) and the Vienna Internet Exchange. On the side, I taught courses on Internet Security and BGP routing at the Universities of Applied Sciences in Wiener Neustadt and Hagenberg.

From 2008 to 2014, I was a networking consultant for the Office of the Austrian Federal President. I redesigned the IT network of the President of Austria and trained staff on cybersecurity. In between, I briefly worked at the Upper Austrian Federal State Government before joining RISC Software GmbH in Hagenberg, where I worked on cloud computing and Ceph storage systems.

In 2014 came the big leap: I was invited for a tour of the Google Zürich office, applied for a job — and got in! I packed up the whole family and moved to Switzerland. At Google I worked as a Site Reliability Engineer and was co-responsible for monitoring all production systems. I became Tech Lead for Google’s internal alerting system and co-built what the outside world knows as Stackdriver. Later I was promoted to Senior SRE Manager, bootstrapped a team for Google Fi in Zürich, and worked on a feature of the Wifi Assistant on Android.

After 5 amazing years at Google, I moved back home. Since 2019 I’ve been working at GitHub as a Staff Engineering Manager. I lead the Observability team, making sure a fleet of tens of thousands of computers and thousands of services stays healthy. I rolled out OpenTelemetry across 2,000+ engineers and was one of back then only three people in Europe serving as on-call Incident Commander for critical outages. For several years now I’ve been focused on Performance Engineering at GitHub, leading a small team that optimizes GitHub for efficiency.

Sports

I love sports that require a lot of balance. It all started with unicycling, which I pursued very intensively. I scored number 5 in the world championships in street unicycling in 2006. During my unicycling phase I produced some movies, which are linked in the following section: My Sports

After a knee injury I switched to rock climbing, and after that I was a grown-up with enough money to afford my dream: a trial bike. I have loved riding my street trial bike ever since.