Heiko Kernbach
AI Data Platform APO (Area Product Owner)
Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolHeiko Kernbach is an AI platform leader and former founding engineer of ArangoDB with 14 years of experience building distributed databases, graph systems, and production-ready ML infrastructure. Now Area Product Owner for Arango.AI, he combines deep C++ and Rust systems work with frontend and DevOps experience to shepherd GenAI orchestration, GraphML, MLOps, and inference tooling into a unified contextual data platform. Heiko’s hands-on background ranges from authoring the ArangoDB web UI and graph viewer to refactoring core clustering and graph analytics engines and moving experimental Elixir/Erlang prototypes into a Rust-based production engine. Known for bridging engineering and product, he focuses on explainable, governed AI deployments (RAG/GraphRAG/HybridRAG) that preserve business context across multimodal data. Based in Cologne, he ships end-to-end solutions that amplify human teams with AI while retaining deep performance and scalability instincts from his database roots.
14 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS, Informatik, Bachelor of Science - BS, Informatik at Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences
English, German
Github Skills (7)
uid10
aql10
javascript10
front-end-development10
ui-design10
graph-database10
json9
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
arangodb/arangodb
Dec 2011 - Jan 2023
🥑 ArangoDB is a native multi-model database with flexible data models for documents, graphs, and key-values. Build high performance applications using a convenient SQL-like query language or JavaScript extensions.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:884 reviews, 3909 commits, 820 PRs in 11 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Heiko primarily focused on UI improvements and bug fixes within the ArangoDB web interface. Their commits include changes to the query view, such as enhancements to the profiling UI, and addressing bugs related to document and edge handling. Additionally, they contributed to the graph viewer by adding functionality like "load full graph," and improving user interaction for edge creation, along with general performance optimizations. They demonstrate expertise in front-end development and likely have knowledge of AQL, JSON and Javascript.
data-modelsdatabase-modelextensionsjavascriptquery-language
arangodb/arangodb-java-driver-async
Oct 2018 - Jul 2019
ArangoDB Asynchronous Java driver
Contributions:2 releases, 29 commits, 2 PRs in 9 months
asynchronousfaunadbnosqldatabasejava
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