Christian Häringer
Director of Engineering
Berlin, Germany
Hands-on engineering leader with 20+ years in software and 13+ years leading teams, across VC-backed startups, a health data non-profit, digital agencies and a product studio.
Agent-first teams · Outcomes, not output
Director of Engineering Photography:
Julia Kestner
Brands I’ve worked with:
I make engineering teams faster, not bigger, and build software that holds up under real traffic, real regulation and years of change.
- Years in engineering
- 20+
- Years leading teams
- 13+
- Engineers hired
- 50+
- Org scaled
- 10→25
Now:
Building at acb.studio
Search that knows when it isn’t sure.
Natural-language product search for a retail client. Customers describe what they need in one sentence, and the shop’s existing filters fill themselves in.
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01
Instead of generating text, a decision model answers a handful of typed questions about the sentence in a single call, each with a calibrated confidence score.
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02
Confident answers are applied as filters. Uncertain ones are only suggested. Every pre-filled filter says why it is there and can be removed on its own.
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03
It runs on top of the search the shop already has. No new search stack, no chatbot, no answers made up on a guess.
So what: the model’s uncertainty becomes part of the interface instead of something to hide. Customers get a faster way into the catalogue, and the shop stays in control of what is shown.
Why not just use an LLM: a decision model answers in milliseconds instead of seconds, at a fraction of the cost per search.
Experience
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2023–Now
Director of Engineering
Lead a senior core team and made it agent-first: the workflows, guardrails and review habits that let a small team ship like a bigger one.
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2019–2023
VP Engineering
Scaled engineering from ~10 to ~25 across five disciplines and built the hiring and career system. Co-developed CovApp with Charité.
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2012–2018
Director Frontend Development
Built and led the frontend team. Interim tech lead inside 15+ portfolio companies across e-commerce, fintech and health.
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2009–2012
Web Developer, Hamburg
e7 / Elephant Seven and deepblue networks. Built Mercedes-Benz's first responsive website.
Skills
Leadership:
- Org design
- Hiring systems
- Coaching & performance
- Post-merger integration
- Technical due diligence
Engineering:
- Platform & API design
- Scalability & caching
- Security & GDPR
- Web performance
- Accessibility
AI:
- Agentic engineering
- Guardrails for AI code
- Natural-language search
- Decision models
- LLM fundamentals
Education
Dipl.-Ing. Media Technology, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, 2005–2009
Languages
German (native) · English (full professional) · Spanish · French
Side projects
All side projects →-
01 · Mac & iPhone app
Ichie
Turns a pile of Live Photos into one short film.
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02 · Web app
xfader.app
A crossfader for YouTube, like a DJ mixer in your browser.
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03 · In stealth
Name not announced yet
Something new is taking shape. More when it’s ready.