Joa Ebert

crafting systems, building products, empowering people

Joa Ebert

I wrote my first line of code when I was eight. That was of my life ago, and I haven't stopped since. At sixteen I studied mathematics. At eighteen I spent my evenings writing neural networks in C++. Then I dropped out of university and slept on a couch in Paris, because a startup there offered me a job. No regrets ✌️

Since then I co-founded a few companies, two of which were acquired. I built engineering teams from the first hire and gave talks in Europe and the US. For the last couple of years I worked on live video for broadcasters, where there is no second take.

I care a lot about how software looks and feels to use. A few design awards came out of that.

Today I'm back where I grew up, at the edge of the Teutoburger Forest. I teach teenagers to think in algorithms and show them what actually happens inside an AI model. Local startups get my advice for free if they want it.

Work

Distributed Systems

  • Designed and patented a live video router in the cloud, trusted by broadcasters worldwide and by the highest profile esports tournaments.
  • Contributed to infrastructure holding 99.9999% uptime — half a minute of downtime a year — for live video that cannot be replayed
  • Built autonomous systems that notice their own failures and recover without anyone watching
  • Now working on distributed monitoring, ML-based observability and automation at scale

Engineering Leadership

  • CTO at Make.TV from 2016, through to the acquisition by LTN Global Inc.
  • A servant leader by conviction: my job is to clear the road, not to drive
  • Grew an early-stage team into 20+ engineers across several time zones
  • Introduced SRE and DevOps practices in multiple organizations, and made them stick
  • Carried engineering through two acquisitions, from due diligence to integration
  • A good eye for talent, and a better record of keeping it
  • Today: architecture, distributed systems, and the engineering culture that holds both together

Product & UI/UX

  • Co-founded Audiotool, a full music studio living in the browser, used by millions
  • A stubborn instinct for how a product should feel, usually well before I can explain why
  • Red Dot Award and German Design Award winner, among others

Compilers, VMs & Language Runtimes

  • Co-founded Defrac, a Java bytecode compiler with an SSA optimization pipeline that carried one source tree to iOS, Android, and the web; acquired by Make.TV
  • An LLVM-based AOT compiler and runtime for Java bytecode, built on a Sea-of-Nodes IR, emitting native code and WebAssembly
  • Brought compiler and VM thinking to broadcast infrastructure, where scheduling a pipeline across the cloud is not so different from scheduling a program
  • Flash bytecode optimization tooling, down to a transpiler for shader bytecode

AI & Machine Learning

  • Phobos, a tiny, scale-free kernel language written in Rust on MLIR & LLVM. One kernel source compiles unchanged from a single GPU to a multi-node tile-DAG, at 76% of cuBLAS throughput.
  • Phobos inference, an LLM engine where every kernel is compiled from Phobos at runtime. Replaying a coding agent's sessions on a seven-year-old GPU, it finishes 1.4–2× faster than llama.cpp.
  • Real-time object recognition in 2005: C++, no GPU, no frameworks to hide behind
  • Robotics on a scholarship, 2004
  • Anomaly detection and predictive incident management, in production and on call
  • Expert systems for incident response, built on decision tree learning
  • A distributed agent harness with hierarchical task supervision

Community

  • Speaker at jsconf.eu, FITC and elsewhere
  • Taught algorithmic problem solving and AI to teenagers at a local school, pro bono
  • Technology consulting for local startups, also pro bono
  • Open source: github.com/joa

Blog

Follow me and get in touch.

Joa Ebert Am Hang 6 33619 Bielefeld Germany