// data & ai platform architect
Roland Utz
I architect and build enterprise data platforms and production AI systems — from streaming pipelines to LLM applications — for banking, telecom, energy, and industrial clients.
what i do
Architecture, hands-on engineering,
and technical leadership.
Physicist by training, engineer by trade. Fifteen-plus years as an independent contractor delivering large-scale data and machine-learning systems to enterprise standards of governance, compliance, and scale.
01 / data-platform-engineering
Data Platform Engineering
End-to-end pipelines and cloud big-data platforms at enterprise scale — streaming, warehousing, and governance built to survive production.
Spark · Kafka · Flink · Snowflake · Airflow
02 / generative-ai-llm-systems
Generative AI & LLM Systems
Production NLP, deep learning, and LLM applications — RAG platforms, model selection, fine-tuning, and evaluation strategies that ground answers in facts.
PyTorch · Transformers · vLLM · Milvus · Qdrant
03 / distributed-systems-cloud
Distributed Systems & Cloud
Cloud-native architectures across Azure, AWS, and GCP — Kubernetes, high-throughput messaging, and migrations off legacy on-prem ecosystems.
Azure · AWS · GCP · Kubernetes · Docker
selected work
Systems that shipped.
Enterprise Software Vendor
Enterprise RAG Platform
Greenfield Retrieval-Augmented Generation platform, from concept through MVP: ingestion, embeddings, vector search, and LLM orchestration across enterprise knowledge sources.
Python · PyTorch · vLLM
Major German Bank
Big Data Platform & Pipelines
Distributed Spark pipelines for the bank’s next-generation big data platform, with the technical evaluation that established Spark as its core compute engine.
Spark · Scala · Hadoop
European Telecom Group
Cloud Big Data Migration
Migration of a legacy on-premises Cloudera ecosystem to a cloud-native Azure architecture for high-volume telecom streams, including a custom Spark geospatial library.
Azure · Kafka · Kubernetes
Industrial SMB
IIoT Anomaly Detection
Sensor analytics and anomaly detection for industrial IoT, designed, productionized, and cost-optimized on AWS.
Python · TensorFlow · AWS
from the blog
Notes from the field.
September 20, 2026
I Finally Built the Golden Dataset
Six articles ended with some version of “measure it.” This one shows how, starting with the dataset I spent most of the series admitting I didn’t have.
read
September 13, 2026
The Chunk Was Never the Document
Five articles of retrieval tuning assumed a chunk is a span of text you can embed, cite, and delete. Point that assumption at a scanned invoice or a 400 page equipment manual and watch it come apart. This is what replaces it, and what the replacement costs.
read
September 6, 2026
The Loop That Doesn't Know When to Stop
Adaptive RAG makes one decision before retrieval. Agentic RAG makes a decision after every step, and keeps making them until something tells it to stop. The loop was never the hard part. The stopping condition is.
read