
Hans Luther
Verified Expert in Engineering
Data Architect Developer
Berlin, Germany
Toptal member since December 8, 2020
Hans is a full-stack AI engineer who takes systems from architecture to production. In his 19 years of experience spanning engineering and business leadership, he has architected a 100+-microservice platform on GCP with a multi-database data lake and led a global team of 13. Since 2023, Hans has shipped production LLM pipelines, voice AI, and agent orchestration in regulated healthcare, and now uses agent-driven development to ship in weeks what used to take months.
Portfolio
Experience
- Google Cloud Platform (GCP) - 6 years
- Python - 5 years
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) - 4 years
- TypeScript - 4 years
- Large Language Models (LLMs) - 3 years
- Model Context Protocol (MCP) - 1 year
- AI Agents - 1 year
- Claude Code - 1 year
Preferred Environment
React, TypeScript, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Claude Code, Python, Terraform, Cloudflare, Model Context Protocol (MCP), React Native, PostgreSQL
The most amazing...
...pipeline I've built classifies and cross-references 1,500+ executive orders with an LLM at under 1% error, shipped solo in five weeks.
Work Experience
Independent AI Engineer & Solutions Architect
Self-employed
- Founded an independent AI engineering practice in May 2026, delivering production LLM systems, agent architectures, and hands-on technical leadership to founder-led and venture-backed clients.
- Architected and built a production voice agent for a US healthcare startup, running outbound clinical intake calls over LiveKit and Twilio with Deepgram speech-to-text, GPT-4o reasoning, and Cartesia synthesis.
- Instrumented that voice pipeline end-to-end with Langfuse over OpenTelemetry, making per-turn latency and failure modes observable across a live call.
- Partnered with a K-12 edtech founder as technical architect on a vertical AI app builder that lets non-technical administrators generate custom applications from natural-language prompts.
- Designed a managed-runtime architecture pairing AI code generation with a governed back end, so generated apps inherit auth, data models, and compliance posture instead of reinventing them.
- Shipped Oval Brief (ovalbrief.com) solo: six Cloudflare Workers, Neon PostgreSQL with pgvector, and a React Native app, taking 1,500+ US executive orders from blank repo to production in five weeks.
- Kept agent-driven development under the same review discipline as any team codebase — reviewed PRs, automated checks, parallel Claude Code instances on git worktrees — shipping months of work in weeks.
- Advised clients on LLM architecture decisions spanning model selection, retrieval strategy, agent orchestration, and evaluation, favoring designs that stay debuggable in production.
Fractional CTO
Rising Seer
- Served as fractional CTO for an AI-powered consumer mobile product, owning roadmap, architecture, developer enablement, and output validation.
- Directed an offshore development team, setting technical direction and holding delivery to an agreed quality bar.
- Validated developer output through systematic code review, catching architectural drift and quality regressions before they reached production.
- Established CI/CD and code-quality practices, moving the team onto reviewed pull requests with automated checks.
- Reworked the mobile deploy pipeline, unblocking release management across iOS and Android build profiles.
- Acted as the technical counterweight to a non-technical founder, translating product goals into architecture decisions and delivery sequencing.
Senior Full-stack Engineer
Kyan Health
- Built an AI investigation agent using Mastra orchestration with two custom MCP servers (BigQuery and Firestore) for video call diagnosis, cutting investigation time by more than 80%.
- Contributed to a production voice AI assistant using the OpenAI Realtime API with WebRTC transport across mobile and web in a regulated healthcare environment.
- Adopted Claude Code first at the company in May 2025 and scaled it from a personal tool to the team-wide engineering standard.
- Migrated 200+ Firebase Cloud Functions with zero downtime using up to four parallel Claude Code instances on git worktrees.
- Modernized the web application through agentic workflows: 20+ dependency upgrades across 1,293 files, around 92,000 net lines removed, and around 20 regressions in QA.
- Established Terraform infrastructure-as-code across the platform, cutting CI/CD deployment time by 50%.
- Built a real-time BigQuery analytics platform processing 10TB+/month, powering 50+ Looker Studio charts and a 65% cost reduction.
- Built a China-region proxy on Cloudflare Workers with path-based routing to 8 blocked Google API endpoints, unblocking a client expansion without rebuilding GCP infrastructure.
- Maintained Firestore WebChannel session state at the edge using Cloudflare Durable Objects, turning a stateless proxy into a stateful long-polling protocol handler.
Lead Full-stack Engineer
Anchor AI
- Led engineering for an AI meeting intelligence platform, including one of the earliest production Claude integrations in spring 2023.
- Built a four-tier output pipeline: one-sentence summary, topical summary, paragraph-level minutes, and action items with speaker attribution.
- Extracted structured data from Claude responses using XML tag parsing and line-prefix matching, before the tool use of JSON mode existed.
- Configured, maintained, and optimized Kubernetes infrastructure on AWS.
- Re-engineered the back end from JavaScript to TypeScript with event-based microservices, achieving over 90% crash reduction.
- Built Max, a conversational Q&A assistant answering natural-language queries against meeting transcripts via AssemblyAI LemUR.
- Orchestrated concurrent transcript processing by fanning out to five parallel Cloud Functions through Cloud Pub/Sub.
- Modernized the React front end with a custom design system and migrated the team to trunk-based continuous delivery.
Chief Software Development Engineer
Fountain Life
- Architected an event-driven healthcare platform of 100+ microservices on Google Pub/Sub across App Engine, Cloud Run, and GKE.
- Led a global team of 13 engineers across multiple time zones, spanning UI/UX, front-end, back-end, full-stack, QA automation, and data engineering.
- Developed React front-end applications and managed and containerized back-end applications in Python, Go, JavaScript/TypeScript, and Rust.
- Built a healthcare journey engine using state-machine orchestration with conditional branching and YAML-driven configuration across 11 journey types.
- Designed polyglot persistence with BigQuery for analytics, MySQL for clinical data, Firestore for real-time state, and Cloud Datastore for high-throughput documents.
- Delivered 19+ micro-frontends through an iframe bridge architecture into iOS, Android, and web clients.
- Implemented runtime white-labeling via CSS custom properties, serving 14+ partner groups from a single codebase.
- Rewrote the registration API in Go with a fan-out concurrency pattern, supporting 500 simultaneous sign-ups during a high-volume book launch.
- Deployed the platform across multiple regions using Terraform, with a shared Python library enforcing consistent auth, logging, and data access.
CTO | Full-stack Developer
ZeroBase
- Designed the application architecture and data structure for a cloud-based business planning application from scratch to launch with over 50 users on two continents in under 75 days.
- Developed the business logic, back end, and database functionality with TypeScript for cloud functions and Python.
- Managed a multinational team of two to three front-end developers and provided ongoing user support while developing new features for the application.
Chief GCP Engineer
Fountain Life LLC
- Designed and implemented Fountain Life's Google Cloud Platform Infrastructure, including Security/IAM, Cloud Endpoints with ESPv2, Google Pub/Sub, Compute Engine, and more.
- Developed a healthcare journey finite state machine, a containerized service at the core of the operating system, and multiple React web applications.
- Built Gitlab CI/CD pipelines for cloud run, app engine, and cloud functions.
- Coordinated testing and release cycles, reviewed code through merge/pull requests, and mentored team members. Created, assigned, and managed engineering tasks based on user stories.
- Hosted daily scrum-style team stand-ups, tech-stack reviews, and sharing of principles and best-practices.
Senior IBM TM1 Consultant
Aviana Global Technologies, Inc.
- Led projects and architected solutions for key hospitality clients and financial institutions.
- Designed and implemented a daily operations report, budgeting, and forecasting solution for an American casino and entertainment properties' four Nevada casinos.
- Developed and integrated revenue and profitability reporting solution for enhanced asset valuation at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas.
- Implemented allowance for loan and lease losses (ALLL) and branch scorecards at Central Pacific Bank in Hawaii.
Founder | Full-stack Developer
StrideFly Tracking Systems
- Designed and developed a real-time tracking system for outdoor running events, consisting of a tracking server to perform geographic calculations and a web-based interface to display runners' movements with detailed statistics and projections.
- Pivoted from an internet-based system to a self-contained solution utilizing a custom-built radiofrequency GPS tracker to solve cellular connectivity issues at remote event locations.
- Oversaw the prototype launch at a 24-hour Ragnar Trail running event with hundreds of participants.
Technology and Management Roles
Deutsche Bank
- Provided support for all equity derivatives risk and trading applications on Deutsche Bank's New York trading floor.
- Created a weekend training program that focused on closing knowledge gaps and forming a team bond, allowing the team to excel in the high-pressure trading floor environment.
- Led operational and business management activities for the North American equity derivatives trading desk and oversaw control and support groups for obtaining new business approvals to establish additional revenue streams.
Experience
Oval Brief — AI-powered Civic Intelligence Platform
https://ovalbrief.comThe back end is six Cloudflare Workers on a queue-based async pipeline over Neon PostgreSQL with pgvector. It processes 1,500+ executive orders from 1994 to today, producing plain-English summaries, calibrated 1-10 impact scores, and classifications across a 26-topic taxonomy and a 32-affected-group scheme. Claude handles analysis; OpenAI supplies 1536-dimensional embeddings.
Cross-references between orders are found in three phases: regex for explicit citations, embedding similarity for implicit ones, and then LLM semantic validation. Moving candidate selection from taxonomy matching to embeddings lifted precision from around 14% to over 50%.
The hardest problem was classification accuracy. Systematic prompt engineering against a 72-order calibration set cut the affected-groups error rate from 31% to under 1%.
I developed the mobile app in React Native/Expo for iOS and Android, tRPC for end-to-end type safety. It's built with agentic development using Claude Code: 962 commits and 221 PRs.
Anchor AI — GenAI Meeting Intelligence Platform
Audio flows through AssemblyAI for transcription, then Cloud Pub/Sub fans out to five parallel Cloud Functions running Claude via the LemUR API. Each meeting yields a one-sentence summary, a topical summary, paragraph-level minutes, and action items with speaker attribution — plus auto-generated titles and prep agendas built from the previous meeting's open items.
Getting structured data out of early Claude was the real work. Three parsing strategies: XML tags for simple values, line-prefix matching for topic summaries, and JSON coercion for action items — the last took 17+ regex iterations to survive inconsistent quoting and explanatory preamble. Model selection by task: Haiku for summarization speed and cost, Sonnet where reliable structured extraction mattered.
Results are written to Firestore and surface through real-time listeners, so the UI fills in as each feature completes. I also built "Max", a stateless Q&A assistant answering natural-language questions against full transcript context.
Fountain OS — Event-driven Healthcare Platform (100+ Microservices)
https://www.fountainlife.comThe backbone is Google Pub/Sub, connecting 100+ microservices across App Engine, Cloud Run, and GKE, with a finite-state machine orchestrating 11 diagnostic journey types. Data sits in purpose-matched stores: BigQuery for analytics, MySQL for clinical records, Firestore for real-time state, Cloud Datastore for high-throughput documents.
The hardest problem was white-label delivery for 14+ partners without per-partner builds. I designed an iframe-based micro-frontend architecture: native iOS and Android apps render a React shell, while patient-facing screens are independently deployable App Engine services receiving auth tokens, patient data, and branding through URL parameters, with complex objects base64-encoded. Navigation is backend-driven — the state machine writes configs to Firebase RTDB and the shell re-renders reactively. Branding is entirely runtime via CSS custom properties, so one codebase serves every partner, and no native release is needed for content or branding changes.
ZeroBase — Real-time Financial Planning Platform
The hard part was the calculation engine: an income statement hierarchy stored as individual Firestore documents, mixing rollup accounts, formula-driven accounts that reference other accounts, and labor accounts computed from position-level data.
Edits had to be completed in under 1 second, including the network round trip, which ruled out recalculating the changed branch—Firestore's per-document reads would pull dozens of untouched siblings at every level. I implemented incremental delta propagation: only the difference travels up to each ancestor, no sibling reads, no sums recomputed.
Full recalculation had no deterministic ordering—rollups depend on drivers, drivers on values, with cross-references throughout. I designed a bottom-up dependency resolver: calculate everything with no remaining dependencies, strip those from the others' lists, repeat. A topological sort across 3 account-type buckets, on Cloud Functions.
Angular, Akita, and RxJS up front. The MVP was shipped in under 3 months and won the first customer contract.
Bank Regulatory Reports
I developed this app using Python to ETL the data into a Cloud Firestore database. A React front end accesses the data through a REST API exposed by Cloud Functions for Firebase.
Radio Frequency GPS Tracking System
The WPF client connects to the receiving XBee radio via a serial connection and plots GPS positions on a map enhanced with a predefined GPX course map.
Education
Master's Degree in Computer Information Systems
Friedrich–Alexander University Erlangen–Nürnberg - Nuremberg, Germany
Skills
Libraries/APIs
React, Node.js, REST APIs, Google APIs, Claude API, RxJS, Entity Framework, Web API, WebRTC
Tools
Git, GitLab CI/CD, Claude Code, BigQuery, Claude, Expo, GitHub, Terraform, Whisper, Codex, ChatGPT
Languages
TypeScript, JavaScript, SQL, Python, HTML, CSS, ECMAScript (ES6), C, Java, C#, Go, GraphQL, Embedded C, Rust
Frameworks
Angular, .NET, Redux, Flask, Express.js, React Native, Agentic Frameworks, Next.js
Paradigms
ETL, Management, Microservices, Database Design, RESTful Development, Mobile Development, DevOps, Model Context Protocol (MCP), HIPAA Compliance
Platforms
Firebase, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Linux, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Docker, Algolia, Kubernetes, Android, iOS, Twilio, Langfuse, LiveKit
Storage
Databases, Cloud Firestore, NoSQL, SQLite, Google Cloud, Google Cloud Storage, JSON, PostgreSQL, Data Lakes, Microsoft SQL Server, Data Pipelines, MySQL, Data Lake Design
Other
Business Logic, IT Projects, Google Cloud Functions, Firebase Cloud Functions, Scripting, Cloud Storage, Full-stack, Cloud, Solution Architecture, APIs, Serverless, Back-end, Web Development, Front-end, Fintech, User Interface (UI), Cloud Architecture, Pub/Sub, Technical Leadership, Software Architecture, Architecture, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Large Language Models (LLMs), Prompt Engineering, Algorithms, System Architecture, CI/CD Pipelines, API Integration, Agentic AI, Agentic AI Systems, Agentic Workflow Design, Agentic Coding, Healthcare Software, Cross-platform App Development, Back-end Development, Integrations, Mobile App Development, Mobile Apps, Full-stack Development, Web App Development, Networking, ETL Development, AI Agents, AI Voice Agents, Cloudflare, GitHub Actions, App Store Connect, Google Play Store, Speech-to-Text (STT), Pgvector, ElevenLabs Solutions, Healthcare IT, HIPAA, App Store, ChatGPT API, Gemini, Gemini API, Cloudflare Durable Objects, Deepgram, OpenTelemetry
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