Falko Sieverding

AI Solutions Architect | Düsseldorf, Germany

In 1979 not only Pink Floyd released "The Wall" and Sony the Walkman, but my parents, a math/informatics teacher married to a kindergarten teacher, received me on the second to last day of May. Born and raised in the Lower Rhine region of Germany, a bicycle ride distant from the green border with the Netherlands, I found early in life my passion for water sports and board/roleplay games. In 1988 my father handed down to me his Commodore 64 home computer and connected to our old color TV it became the magnet for my attention from then on. Many hours were spent loading Mafia from datasette and playing with 4 friends hot seat, noses inches from the buzzing TV screen. With my Abitur in 1998 and Zivildienst, as orderly for the elderly, done, I studied electrical engineering at RWTH Aachen. Earning my livelihood with different side jobs (lifeguard at the local pool, flipping burgers in the nightshift, building and repairing PCs), I worked my way through every layer of the IT stack across 20+ years, from system administrator at a mechanical engineering institute to leading international teams, from the Euregio to Athens and back. Today, as GitLab's subject matter expert for the Duo Agent Platform, I build the systems that let AI agents ship code in regulated industries.

What I'm Building

• Deploying autonomous AI agents in environments where nothing leaves the building, for automotive OEMs, banks and defense contractors
• Designing zero-trust runtime architectures for autonomous coding agents and governed MCP workflows, solving the security and rollout problems that keep AI-assisted development locked to early adopters instead of reaching every builder in the SDLC
• Building the governance layer for enterprise AI adoption, credit dashboards and cost controls so organizations can scale agents without losing oversight

Speaking

I speak regularly at conferences, workshops and roundtables on AI engineering, AI sovereignty, AI governance and the transformation of the software development lifecycle through agentic AI, both on stage and virtual.

Selected:

• Car IT Symposium 2026, Ingolstadt, "Your Models, Your Rules: Who Really Controls AI in Your Engineering Process?" (speech + panel)
• Bitkom Lenkungsausschuss Software 2026, Berlin, "Agenten statt Assistenten" (speech + roundtable)
• 2Hero/Cillers DevSecOps Flow Hackathon 2026, Chas Academy Stockholm, workshop lead + live credit dashboard (60+ participants)
• GitLab Epic Conference 2025, London + Paris, conference presentations
• GitLab & Google Cloud Fireside Chat 2024, "AI-powered DevSecOps" (moderator)
• Recurring AI agent and MCP integration workshops for automotive OEMs and enterprise customers (2025-2026)

Career

2024-now   AI Solutions Architect, GitLab — Duo Agent Platform SME, SA Center of Excellence
2022-2024  Customer Success Manager → Solutions Architect, GitLab
2022       Customer Success Manager, Code Intelligence (Bonn)
2021-2022  Team Lead Solution Engineering, Fieldcode (Athens)
2019-2021  Technical Support Manager, Fleet Complete (Athens)
2015-2019  IT Support Manager, evosec (Germany)
2005-2015  System Admin → Team Lead, RWTH Aachen
1999-2004  B.Sc. Electrical Engineering, RWTH Aachen

Beyond the Terminal

Next to every job I ever held, there was always a parallel life in board and roleplay games. I wrote the 12-part Arkham Horror "Szenarien-Massaker" campaign for Mephisto magazine, articles for GamesOrbit, created and moderated the Söhne Sigmars podcast about Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, and co-hosted MetaArena, a German-language Android: Netrunner podcast with 50+ episodes.

When Netrunner took over my gaming life, I founded the Euregio Meisterschaften cross-border tournament series, bringing players from Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium together in Aachen and Essen. TeamworkCast streamed our events and somewhere along the way I ended up commentating matches on YouTube, earning nicknames like "the honey badger of Netrunner." My signature deck "The Finger!" went 27-3 across three Store Championships. From 2015 to 2017, working 30 hours a week alongside my day job, I tried making a living in the board game industry with LudiCreations, running crowdfunding campaigns and doing game design. The money was not enough, but the experience was everything.

Since 2013 I am chairman of the Oecher Meeples, a board game club in Aachen. For 24 years I was fitness trainer at SC Delphin Geldern, the swimming club in my hometown. A universal amateur in every sense.

Some of My Favorite Things

In my humble opinion you get a good picture of another human being and perhaps some shared interests by knowing their favorite things.

Books

1. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
2. Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
3. Going Postal - Terry Pratchett

Board Games

1. Saint Petersburg (2004) - Bernd Brunnhofer
2. Android: Netrunner (2012) - Richard Garfield
3. Imperial (2006) - Mac Gerdts

Songs

1. Don't Stop Me Now (1979) - Queen
2. (10) and Counting (2006) - BoySetsFire
3. Family Tree (1996) - H2O

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