Fractional & Interim CTO
Engineering leadership when you need it. I set technical direction, shape the architecture, level up the team, and own delivery — so your roadmap actually ships.
Fractional CTO · AI Solutions Architect
Turn AI ambition into systems that ship.
I'm Dr. Nils Goldbeck — a hands-on technology leader who helps companies design, build and deploy production-grade AI. Fractional CTO leadership and agentic-AI architecture, from the first strategy session to running code.
Available for new engagements
Proven in production
CTO · dRISK.ai
PhD · Imperial College London
$2.2M · venture capital raised
Patented · knowledge-graph tech
3 → 12 · engineering team grown
What I do
Senior technical leadership, on demand.
Three ways I help founders and leadership teams turn AI from a buzzword into reliable systems that move the business — without a full-time hire.
AI Solutions Architecture
End-to-end design of pragmatic AI systems: data, models, evaluation, MLOps, cost and reliability. I take ideas from prototype to a production architecture you can trust and afford.
Agentic AI Engineering
Building autonomous and agentic systems that work in the real world: tool use, orchestration, retrieval, guardrails and rigorous evaluation. Dependable workflows, not flashy demos.
How I work
An operator, not just an advisor.
I embed with your team, set a clear direction, and stay hands-on until it ships. A simple, repeatable model — light on slides, heavy on outcomes.
01 — Diagnose
Understand the real problem
A focused review of your goals, product, data and team. We separate the AI hype from the high-leverage opportunities and agree on what success looks like.
02 — Architect
Design the path to production
A pragmatic technical plan and architecture: build vs. buy, models, data flow, evaluation, cost and risk — scoped to what your team can realistically run.
03 — Ship
Build it with your team
I work alongside your engineers to deliver — writing code where it counts, mentoring as we go, and leaving you with a system and a team that can keep moving without me.
Ways to work together
Fractional retainer — ongoing leadership
Project sprint — a defined build
Technical due diligence — for investors
Advisory — sounding board
About
A decade building data & AI products — in the lab and in production.
I've spent the last decade turning hard technical problems into products people rely on.
As CTO of dRISK.ai, I directed the development of data and AI products for customers across the US and Europe in automotive, finance and professional services — earning traction with seven leading automotive OEMs, growing the engineering team from three to twelve, and helping raise $2.2M in venture capital and $3.2M in R&D grants.
My own work concentrated on three areas that still define my edge: knowledge graphs and graph databases — co-inventing a patented technology to model rare, high-risk edge-case scenarios at scale; GraphRAG — grounding large language models in structured graph knowledge for retrieval that is reliable and explainable; and safety-critical autonomous systems — the data, simulation and testing that assure the safety of self-driving vehicles and similar high-stakes systems.
I'm an engineer who still ships code — across Python, Rust, TypeScript and C#, with cloud, big-data, machine-learning and simulation systems. That work is grounded in a PhD from Imperial College London, where I remain an Honorary Fellow; an MPhil from Cambridge; and a BSc in Industrial Engineering and Management (Wirtschaftsingenieurwesen) from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).
Now I bring that operator's experience to companies as an independent partner — helping you build AI that is ambitious in vision and dependable in production.
— Dr. Nils Goldbeck
Selected organizations I've worked with
Let's talk
Build your next AI system with a partner who has shipped one.
Whether you need fractional CTO leadership, an architecture you can trust, or an agentic system built right — tell me what you're working on. I reply personally to every message.
Available for fractional & project engagements · remote and on-site across Europe