Wanja Zaeske
Team Lead, Research Scientist at German Aerospace Center (DLR)
Hannover-Braunschweig-Göttingen-Wolfsburg Region Germany
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolWanja Zaeske is a research-focused engineering leader with nine years of experience, currently serving as Team Lead and Research Scientist at the German Aerospace Center (DLR). He specializes in bringing DevOps practices to avionic software engineering, with deep hands-on expertise in Linux, CI/CD, containers, and Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) using type 1 hypervisors. An active open-source contributor, he has modernized projects like the post-quantum Rosenpass VPN by introducing Nix flake-based development environments, multi-arch builds, linters, and automated release workflows. Wanja is an enthusiast and practitioner of Rust and the Nix package manager, pairing language-level safety with reproducible build tooling. Based in the Hannover-Braunschweig-Göttingen-Wolfsburg region, he combines academic grounding from TU Clausthal with practical systems engineering aimed at making safety-critical avionics more automatable and auditable. He’s known for favoring pragmatic, reproducible infrastructure choices—his hint: “something something Rust, something something Nix.”
9 years of coding experience
1 year of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science at Clausthal University of Technology / TU Clausthal/ Technische Universität ClausthalMaster of Science - MS, Computer Science, Master of Science - MS, Computer Science at Technische Universität Clausthal
German, English
Github Skills (19)
github-ci10
nix10
cicd10
rust10
githubaction-workflow10
docker8
dockers8
vpn7
wireguard7
cryptography7
sh6
script6
shell6
makefile6
gnu-make6
Programming languages (26)
Github contributions (5)
rosenpass/rosenpass
Feb 2023 - Mar 2023
Rosenpass is a post-quantum-secure VPN that uses WireGuard to transport the actual data.
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:31 reviews, 51 commits, 66 PRs in 13 days
Contributions summary:Wanja significantly enhanced the repository's build and deployment processes by introducing a Nix flake-based development environment. They configured the `flake.nix` file to manage dependencies and builds, specifically targeting various Linux and Darwin architectures. Furthermore, the user implemented quality control checks and added a dedicated release workflow, including adding linters to ensure code quality.
cryptographypost-quantumrustvpnwireguard
wucke13/mavlink-msp-bridge
Jun 2019 - Sep 2020
To be continued...
Contributions:1 release, 47 commits, 1 PR in 1 year 3 months
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