PlanBlue

PlanBlue is a German startup that specializes in advanced seafloor monitoring, offering insights into seafloor health, biodiversity, carbon storage, and pollution to support sustainable marine management and conservation.

Challenge

When I joined PlanBlue, the product was still in refinement and the technical foundation needed alignment. Several services had emerged in parallel but lacked integration, making collaboration and scaling difficult. The existing infrastructure had no proper environments and was being deployed manually — limiting reproducibility, automation, and reliability.

My Contribution

To address these challenges, I took the lead in shaping and implementing PlanBlue’s cloud and infrastructure strategy. I began by migrating the existing setup into Infrastructure as Code (IaC), introducing reproducible development and production environments, and restructuring the system into individually deployable stacks to enable seamless collaboration. From there, I turned my focus to improving the developer experience for data scientists by providing dedicated tooling and core libraries that streamlined workflows, enforced structure, and made their day-to-day work significantly more efficient.

Deploying a new service went from “I don’t know where to start” to simply running five commands.

Key contributions included:

• Cloud & Technical Architecture

  • Led design designed and implementation of the overall cloud infrastructure on AWS.
  • Built an on-demand data processing pipeline for hyperspectral images, including an abstract data layer for ingestion and access across pipeline stages.
  • Integrated Airflow to orchestrate and automate data processing workflows.
  • Developed deployment automation for cloud, on-premise, and edge devices.

• Tooling & Automation

  • Created internal developer experience (DevX) tooling for data scientists, including Python conventions, libraries, abstractions and cli tools.
  • Established a continuous delivery system for fast, reliable, hands-off deployments.
  • Reduced manual oversight by automating validation, monitoring, and alerting for proactive issue resolution.

• Team Support & Mentorship

  • Introduced and enforced best practices in clean code, testing, and software design.
  • Provided mentoring and technical guidance, empowering the team to take ownership of their code.
  • Optimized the scrum process to improve collaboration and delivery.
  • I established clean code and software principals and ensured that everybody can follow up and takes responsibility for their own code.

Impact

With the new cloud and infrastructure foundations in place, PlanBlue’s teams could collaborate more effectively, deploy services independently, and process hyperspectral data at scale. The improvements in automation and monitoring reduced operational overhead, while the internal tooling enabled data scientists to focus on research and service development instead of infrastructure.

Ultimately, this work positioned PlanBlue to scale its technology and continue pioneering sustainable ocean exploration.

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