Munich, Germany

Philipp Riederer

Bare-Metal Cloud Architect

I design and build infrastructure that other people depend on — most recently a bare-metal GPU cloud, from the empty rack to the customer API. I like hard problems, pick up new paradigms quickly, and I am at my best when I turn an architecture into something a team can actually run.

500bare-metal nodes
4000GPUs in production
~70repositories steered
20 yrsof Linux

Experience

Nov 2025 – today

Senior System Architect Epilayer

Sovereign European cloud — carve-out of Genesis Cloud

I set the technical direction of the platform after the Norwegian business was carved out: I write the architecture plans the team builds from — hybrid cloud and digital sovereignty, managed data services, IoT platform, carbon reporting — and steer the implementation across roughly 70 repositories.

Hands-on I extended the IaaS platform with managed Kubernetes, HPC clusters, load balancers and NFS filesystems, migrated all cluster ingress to Traefik without downtime, and built the customer-facing stack: REST API, single-page app, Terraform provider, CSI driver and cloud-controller-manager, and usage-based billing.

  • Kubernetes
  • FastAPI
  • Vue 3
  • Go
  • Terraform
  • Traefik

Nov 2021 – Oct 2025

Senior System Architect Genesis Cloud

GPU cloud provider — backend

With a team of five I replaced the aging and inefficient OpenStack backend of a fleet of 500 nodes and 4000 GPUs serving hundreds of customers. We settled on KubeVirt for VM hosting, with bespoke operators and controllers for networking and storage.

Hosts are completely ephemeral, based on Flatcar Linux and booted from the network in a full GitOps setup — from the empty rack to a running customer VM with GPUs and Infiniband.

  • KubeVirt
  • Ceph
  • SPDK
  • VPP
  • Infiniband
  • Flux
  • Prometheus

Nov 2020 – Oct 2021

Cloud Consultant tecRacer

Consulting — AWS

I helped customers build and migrate their applications on AWS and took a leadership role in the projects I was involved with, with a focus on migrations and data projects.

  • AWS
  • Managed Airflow
  • dbt
  • Snowflake
  • CloudFormation

2011 – 2020

Multiple roles fos4X

Start-up — from founding until the exit

I grew with the company through four roles, from embedded developer to leading the teams behind its digital products:

Lead Big Data Infrastructure Engineer 2019–2020
Led the four-person team behind the digital products: terabytes of measurement data from real wind turbines, and the dashboards customers used to gain insight into their assets.
Head of Unified Software and Infrastructure 2018–2019
Led the six-person team that carried the data from the turbine to analysts and customers — the complete edge-to-cloud infrastructure.
Head of Data Processing and Analytics 2017–2018
Took over the data processing team of eight; during this time we decided to pivot a business line for digital products out of fos4X.
Head of Series Integration Projects 2016–2017
Ran the OEM projects that brought our hardware into wind turbines. The project management framework I designed was still in use in 2020.
Software Developer 2011–2015
Firmware for fiber-optical measurement devices in C: new measurement methods, two field busses (CAN and PROFINET), a webserver and IPv6 via the lwIP stack.

2005 – 2012

System administrator TUM · Multinet · Deutsches Herzzentrum München

Civil service and working-student roles alongside my studies

Chair networks, Linux workstations, file-storage servers, monitoring and hospital IT. Configuration managed with fai — this is where I discovered my passion for X-as-code.

Skills

Cluster architecture

Kubernetes since 2017, on-premise and in the cloud. Ceph, SPDK, KubeVirt and GitOps at the scale of a public cloud region.

Data center design

Non-blocking networks, Infiniband and Ethernet, cloud-native management of bare-metal servers — including bootstrapping new sites.

Linux & automation

Linux administration since 2005, Terraform since 2018, Docker and Ansible since 2016. Infrastructure as code, always.

Programming

Python and C as the daily drivers, plus bash, C++, SQL, TypeScript/Vue and Go. Currently learning Rust.

Certified Kubernetes Administrator (2022, expired). German (native), English (fluent).

Education

2009 – 2012

M.Sc. Computer Science TU München

Focus: networking and low-level programming — grade 1.3

Master thesis (1.0): bootloader and hardware abstraction for the firmware of a fiber-optical measurement device.

2006 – 2009

B.Sc. Computer Science TU München

Bachelor thesis: applicability of hardware transactional memory for high performance computing

Private projects

Multi-home Kubernetes cluster since 2021

A Raspberry Pi, a KVM slice of a dedicated server and a VPS, routed together with BGP over IPsec. Hosts a number of private services.

Own mail infrastructure since 2006

I run my own mail servers — without significant outage.

Routing experiments 2019

Playing with BGP in Docker: github.com/toelke/routing-experiments

Curriculum vitae

Everything above, on paper. The two files hold exactly the same content — they are built from one source — but they are laid out for different readers: the first for a human with a coffee, the second for the application portal that will try to parse it into form fields and mangle a two-column layout while doing so.

CV — designed Two pages, with sidebar · PDF, 580 kB CV — plain layout Single column, parser-friendly · PDF, 48 kB

Elsewhere

cybercyber.org

My tech blog, and the oldest thing on this list: write-ups of problems I had to work out the hard way — Kubernetes, ZFS, mail, routing with network namespaces.

Codeberg

Repositories on a non-commercial European forge — where I put things when I would rather not depend on a single large provider.

GitHub

Public experiments and small tools, plus the occasional fork: routing playgrounds, infrastructure glue, things that were easier to write than to look for.

LinkedIn

The same career in the format recruiters prefer to read it in.

Get in touch

I am available for freelance work — architecture, bare-metal clouds, sovereign infrastructure, or getting a platform team from “it works on this host” to something described in a repository rather than in someone’s memory. Happy to talk about scope and availability.

pr@tum.fail

Impressum

Angaben gemäß § 5 DDG

Philipp Riederer
Freiberufliche IT-Architektur und -Beratung
Guttenbrunner Weg 5
81829 München
Deutschland

E-Mail: pr@tum.fail
Telefon: +49 151 1074 0158

Verantwortlich für den Inhalt nach § 18 Abs. 2 MStV:
Philipp Riederer, Anschrift wie oben.

Verbraucherstreitbeilegung: Ich bin nicht bereit und nicht verpflichtet, an Streitbeilegungsverfahren vor einer Verbraucherschlichtungsstelle teilzunehmen.

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