About
CTO & co-founder · Self-hosted AI & infrastructure · UX · Game development — between Bremen and Bucharest
I'm Marcus — a co-founder and CTO who builds products, teams and the infrastructure that runs them. Since 2019 I've led technology at SOPHIA, our joint venture with B. Braun, where we develop and operate Cayoo, a platform for clinical knowledge, communication and training records used by hospitals in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
My roots are in design, film and game development, and that still shapes how I work: I care about how software feels to the people using it as much as how it's built and run. I shaped Cayoo's user experience from user research in hospitals — personas, surveys, real clinical workflows — all the way to production.
I'm passionate about digital sovereignty: infrastructure and AI you actually own. I run self-hosted models on our own GPU hardware, a self-hosted forge and CI, messaging and agent platforms — inside the EU, GDPR-compliant, with the public cloud used only where it genuinely earns its place. A growing part of my work sits where infrastructure meets AI: retrieval-augmented systems, local model serving and agent workflows wired into real teams, with clear human sign-off.
I live and work between Bremen and Bucharest — at home in both Western and Eastern Europe, with teams and partners in Germany, Romania, Austria and Switzerland. Day-to-day I switch between three languages:
- German — native
- English — full professional
- Romanian — B1
What I do
- CTO & managing partner, SOPHIA GmbH & Co. KG (since 2019) — joint venture with B. Braun; we develop and operate Cayoo.
- Co-founder, portamedia.studio (since 2018) — infrastructure, tooling, and artistic and technical development for games such as Dungeons 4, Metal: Hellsinger and Pioneers of Pagonia.
- Co-founder, portamedia.com (since 2012) — technical service provider for SOPHIA: development, training, team building and infrastructure, including agent-assisted teamwork over self-hosted Matrix.
- Own projects (since 2024) — SuperStatus (status pages and uptime monitoring, including AI/LLM endpoints), BattleLab (tools for working with coding agents) and Gameplayce (games with AI-generated content). Most of it lives on my own git.superstatus.io.
Work with me
I help teams build infrastructure and AI they understand, run and own:
- Self-hosting & infrastructure — production-grade self-hosted stacks: reverse proxies, mail, identity, monitoring, backups, CI/CD.
- AI, in-house — self-hosted models, RAG and agent platforms wired into your real tools, with clear permission boundaries and human-in-the-loop controls.
- Cloud & hybrid — pragmatic Azure and container work, migrations in either direction, and getting off services you'd rather not depend on.
- Product & UX — turning real user needs into software people actually like to use.
How I got here
I started out as a 3D and VFX artist. That took me through game studios and feature-film visual effects — VFX and R&D at Electronic Arts for BattleForge and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2, production work at PIXOMONDO, and years as a freelance VFX and technical artist creating real-time effects, shaders, UI and cutscenes for productions across Germany and beyond. Game development taught me user experience, reward mechanics, interfaces and real-time rendering — and eventually the engineering, DevOps and infrastructure behind shipping real software.
I studied it formally too: a BA (Hons) in Media Production (2011) — my graduation film The Great Leonidas was selected for Hessen Talents at the Berlinale 2012 — and an MA in Media Direction (2018), both with Hochschule Darmstadt and CIT Cork. My master's thesis covered the research, concept and first build of the platform that became Cayoo.
A few honors along the way
- Deutscher Computerspielpreis 2016 — Best Mobile Game, for Path of War (VFX and UI)
- Förderpreis 2015 — for concepts improving intensive-care quality (Cayoo)
- Hessen Talents 2012, Berlinale — graduation film The Great Leonidas