Philipp Lehmann @PhilippTheServer

About

The longer version, with dates.

What I actually do

I own production infrastructure end to end: architecture, deployment, and the far less glamorous day-2 operations that decide whether any of it was a good idea. That spans bare metal, the container platforms on top of it, the network underneath it, and the internal applications that the rest of the company actually touches.

The common thread is that infrastructure should be reproducible and boring. A host that only one person understands is an outage with a delay fuse. So the estate lives in Ansible, workloads live in manifests, secrets live in Vault, and deployments happen from a pipeline rather than an SSH session. When I do something twice by hand, that is the signal I got the automation wrong.

I am also fond of breaking things deliberately. Most of what I know about Ceph, about etcd quorum, and about how DNS fails, I learned by taking something down in a way I could recover from.

Roles

CTO · Nerd Force1 UG · since September 2026

At Nerd Force1 since March 2022, as Head of Administration and IT until the move to CTO. It is part of the AI-Gruppe umbrella brand. I am responsible for the company’s technology: the servers, the network, the platforms, and the internal tooling.

The largest single piece of work is the internal operations platform — a full-stack application that centralised operations and replaced several external tools at once. It carries the internal messenger, time tracking, the ticket system, accounting, a Docker registry frontend, DNS management, VPN management and hosting orchestration. Angular on the front, FastAPI on the back, MySQL and InfluxDB underneath, Celery workers for anything that should not block a request.

Executive Office · open Skunkforce e.V. · since January 2025

I lead a small developer team and coordinate the association’s open-source work. Once a year we host emBO++, the international embedded systems conference, and KiCon, both in Bochum. Association work on GitHub: github.com/skunkforce.

Education

B.Sc. IT Security / Information Engineering — Faculty of Computer Science, Ruhr University Bochum, since October 2021.

Coursework I keep notes and code for publicly: implementation of cryptographic schemes, software security, operating systems, system theory, and electrical engineering. Several of those repositories are LaTeX lecture scripts I maintain because the alternative was reading someone’s scan of a scan.

The stack, honestly

What’s next

Large-scale infrastructure design — I want to understand how data centres get designed and built from nothing. Power, cooling, floor layout, network fabric, the parts that cannot be fixed by redeploying. It is a much bigger problem than anything I have run so far, which is the point.

Working with me

Infrastructure questions, open-source collaboration, or anything about emBO++ and KiCon: philipp.lehmann@gruppe.ai.

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