My name is Markus Lachinger. I write about engineering leadership, software architecture & applied AI, and I keep a curated list of projects and libraries I’ve built and used along the way.
Over the last 15+ years, I’ve worked as an engineering leader and architect building secure, reliable platforms — most notably multi-tenant Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure for SaaS and AI-adjacent products. At SAP, I operated at VP scope across platform engineering, security, and developer experience, helping shape strategy within a ~300-person organization and shipping capabilities such as a Kubernetes Security Module spanning cluster setup, policy, multi-tenancy, and monitoring. I founded and led Phoenix, a Borg-inspired, Istio-based Kubernetes PaaS with a centralized control plane and “sector” isolation model, taking it from inception to production and running critical workloads at >99.97% uptime while driving security-by-default configuration and SOC 2–aligned audit readiness. Along the way I hired and led distributed teams, partnered with product and operations to onboard real workloads, and invested in operational mechanisms, like SLOs, on-call, incident response, and SDLC improvements to make delivery faster and safer. More recently, I’ve been building in the creator space, shipping a full-stack Twitch rewards management system. I continue to prototype actively, including a large Twitch desktop client and an end-to-end MLOps-style TTS training pipeline with repeatable artifacts and versioned inputs & checkpoints.
Beyond work, I’ve been skiing and snowboarding since I was a kid, I’m new to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and I’m a portrait-photography nerd — usually with my two cats, Hector and Lenore, as “willing” models. They’re 100% just in it for the treats. 😄
If something here sparks a question or a different perspective, I’d love to hear it! Join the discussion in the comments, or reach out on LinkedIn if you’d like to collaborate.
If you’re here for the Adeptus Mechanicus: sorry — this is about software engineering and leadership. 😉
Best,
