Resume
Christian Riesen
Applied AI & Enterprise Integration Leader
Summary
Executive technology leader with thirty years in the industry, the last decade spent taking large-scale platforms and applied AI from concept to production in regulated environments: healthcare, government, education and finance. Full disciplinary and technical leadership in three organizations: hiring, developing and keeping teams that go on delivering. I conceived rokka.io, won its first customers and scaled it as CTO to 200 million images and 1 billion hits a day, building the team to 15 with zero attrition. Today I lead the engineering group at AlpineAI, Switzerland's secure-inference company, and own a CHF 10 million, ten-year AI programme for 116 municipalities.
Selected Achievements
How I lead
The best system I ever built was a team.
Architecture and organization are the same craft: you are designing something that has to keep working under load, on a Tuesday, without you. At rokka that meant handing ownership over as fast as people could carry it, from coder to teacher to CTO, until 15 engineers ran a platform serving 1 billion hits a day and I was free to build what came next. A team that strong is not a succession plan. It is the compounding asset.
People stay where they grow.
Hiring, developing and trusting people beats managing them. Teaching has been part of the job since 1998: programming languages, the engineering principles behind good decisions, and how organizations actually work when nobody is watching.
Organizations are systems — design them like one.
Organizational theory as a continuing discipline, applied: a Kanban transformation at Teleboy, a Holacracy transition at Liip, the core ideas of an award-winning salary system. Professional consultants call me in when one of their hardest cases gets stuck.
Reliability is a leadership choice, not an ops metric.
The decisive call at rokka was to make the platform self-healing and self-scaling, so it repairs and rebalances itself instead of paging a human, and to hold that line against every shortcut that would have traded it away. The result was eight years of 100% rendering uptime and nobody woken at 2 a.m. Sustainable systems and sustainable teams are the same decision.
Fix it first. Then learn. Never blame.
When something breaks, priority one is getting it working — nothing else. If it matters who did what, it is only ever to reconstruct the path: the actions taken, the options that looked reasonable at the time, the signals that were missing. The postmortem comes after the fix and hunts the root cause and the change that prevents a repeat: policy, tooling, team, whatever it turns out to be. Never the person; nobody is perfect. Mistakes and accidents are inevitable, and how a team handles them is what defines it.
Business first, technology in its service.
I conceived rokka, validated it by trying to kill it, won the first customer myself and scaled it — revenue more than doubling in each of the first three years. Technology choices are business choices.
Experience
- Lead the developer group at Switzerland's secure-inference company: a full ChatGPT-class platform serving 3,500 customers in healthcare, government, education and finance, on company-owned GPU infrastructure in Swiss data centres. No hyperscalers; customer data never leaves Switzerland.
- Own the egovpartner programme end to end after co-winning its public tender: 116 municipalities of the canton of Zürich, CHF 10 million, a ten-year horizon, currently onboarding municipalities, SSO requirements and all.
- Designed and built the integration platform decoupling AI transcription from third-party practice-management and government systems, taking new-integration delivery from two months to under two days under strict tenant isolation.
- Built out NVIDIA DGX infrastructure in secure Swiss data centres: installed the DGX H200, drove the DGX B300 acquisition and the data-centre expansion around it, tripling compute, and provision the 12-node Kubernetes production cluster. CHF 600K of infrastructure procurement run personally.
- Raised speech-to-text quality and throughput on a platform transcribing 1,000 hours of audio every workday: sharper speaker diarization, early low-quality-audio detection, an hour of audio transcribed in seconds instead of minutes.
- Technical counterpart for sales, customers and partners on the OpenAI-compatible API platform; stakeholder management across municipalities, federal offices and ZHAW; moved Windows code signing from a cloud HSM onto hardware.
- Conceived the product inside the agency, validated it with the team under an explicit "try to kill it" mandate and won the first customer myself (Migros); revenue more than doubled year over year in each of the first three years.
- Architected a self-healing, two-region AWS platform that survives the complete loss of either region, serving 200M images and 1B hits per day at 100% rendering uptime over eight years. Nobody gets paged at 2 a.m.; the architecture is unchanged to this day.
- Built the team to 15 with zero attrition, and a steady stream of people pushing to join, moving deliberately from original coder to project lead and sales, to team builder and teacher, to CTO. Wrote no code in the final years because the team no longer needed it.
- Engineering it turned on: API-first with every output format under its own URL, so cache invalidation is never needed; progressive optimization on first hit; multi-layer render caching with thundering-herd protection. Customers included SRF, Migros and Freitag.
- Architected Migros' product-data REST API: ETL over multiple millions of products from 30+ heterogeneous sources (CSV/XML, Oracle, MS SQL, Kafka, RabbitMQ, WebHDFS) into a core enterprise service on Elasticsearch behind Varnish, later Kong; led a complete rewrite for partial mappings and markedly faster processing.
- Architected the base infrastructure and cryptography concepts of the Swiss e-ID for the federal government (BIT, 2024), challenged the architectures of adjacent workstreams, and co-authored the white paper released for public consultation.
- Helped build Liip's retrieval-augmented generation platform, which now powers several customer AI systems including the public question-answering assistant of the city of Basel.
- Supported Migros' migration into Google Cloud Platform, then embedded and steered Migros-internal developers through a complete platform handover of knowledge, code and operations.
- Originated the core ideas of Liip's salary system: Swiss HR Award 2022 in Diversity, Inclusion & Equality, salary satisfaction up from 82% to 97%. Active contributor to the company's transition to a teal organization on Holacracy.
- Turned a team that ran on "who screams loudest" into an agile one: workshopped the options with the team and the business, settled on Kanban, introduced it and made the process stick.
- Planned, managed and implemented a service-oriented architecture on Switzerland's highest-reach online TV platform, transforming the data structures with zero interruption while new features kept shipping.
- Steered an 8-person London partner team through the video-on-demand build: infrastructure, technical integration and inter-company licence management.
- Modernized the engineering setup: legacy PHP to Symfony 2, Subversion to Git, standardized environments before Docker existed, Jenkins CI with a growing test suite.
- Built a flyer pre-production application for Denner driving automated InDesign placement of assets, prices and texts in three languages, plus the cached-render layer on the DetailNet image database, the first precursor of rokka.
Senior Developer and Linux sysadmin at Youngtek, steering a fully distributed 6-developer team across England, the Netherlands, Finland, Thailand and Albania, fully remote in 2008 long before that was normal; Operations Manager at Plantraco in Canada, running production and e-commerce for a maker of micro remote-controlled aircraft; technical sales at STEG Computer; self-employed IT consultant; plus support, teaching and development roles from entry into the industry at 16 — including, in my early twenties, running a self-built 25-server platform serving 2.5 million visitors a day with 150 volunteers.
Skills
Leadership & Organization
Full disciplinary responsibility — hiring, firing, improvement plans, and technical leadership in three organizations; team building and retention (15 people, zero attrition); 50+ hires from 300+ interviews; steering nearshore teams and external agencies across five countries; programme and budget ownership; public tenders and technical pre-sales; organizational design as a continuing discipline (Kanban transformation, Scrum, SAFe, Holacracy); teaching and mentoring since 1998.
Applied AI & ML
Generative AI in production, agentic workflows, RAG assistants, LLM platform integration, OpenAI-compatible APIs, open-weight model serving on vLLM (Mistral, Llama, Qwen, Gemma, Kimi) and Whisper for speech, document extraction with Docling, routing mechanisms, embeddings & vector search (Qdrant), speech-to-text pipelines with diarization and quality gating, speaker recognition, real-time ASR, spec-driven agentic development.
Cloud & Infrastructure
AWS (EC2, S3, CloudFront, SQS, DynamoDB, RDS, multi-region, serverless), Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, Docker, Linux, CI/CD (GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins), NVIDIA DGX GPU infrastructure (H200, B300), data-centre buildout, networking hands-on — MikroTik and UniFi routers, switches and WiFi, plus UniFi surveillance installations.
Architecture & Integration
Integration platforms with tenant isolation, API-first REST design, SOA, message-oriented middleware (Kafka, RabbitMQ), API caching (Varnish, Kong), ETL at multi-million-record scale, self-healing multi-region systems, zero-downtime migrations.
Security & Regulated
Applied cryptography, content encryption and encryption at rest, hardware and cloud HSMs, code signing, tenant isolation, Self-Sovereign Identity and the Swiss e-ID, VPN and network security, confidential and specially protected personal data, security clearance held.
Engineering & Data
Rust, TypeScript (SvelteKit, Next.js, React, Angular), PHP (Symfony; Zend Certified Engineer), Go, Java (Spring Boot), Python; PostgreSQL, MySQL, DynamoDB, Qdrant, Elasticsearch, Redis, Dragonfly; RabbitMQ and Apache Kafka; Git at depth.
A selection of what is most in use right now. Thirty years leave a much longer list of smaller and larger technologies, new and old, picked up as the work needed them.
Education & Certs
- Zend Certified Engineer, PHP (2012, re-certified 2014)
- Certified SAFe 5 Practitioner (2020)
- Self-taught engineer since 1996 — hardware and networks through architecture and leadership to GPU data centres and agentic AI
Working together
- Remote and hybrid both work well: commute radius Zürich and Winterthur, further afield when on-site is less frequent. Willing to travel.
- Notice period: one month to the end of the month.
- Swiss national, based in Frauenfeld. Clean criminal record; security clearance held.