Dr. Gabriel Nicolas Schenker

I’m Gabriel Schenker, a technology leader who has spent more than 30 years designing, building and evolving mission-critical distributed systems. Today I lead platform engineering and architecture for a digital Life & Health insurer, and I still design, write and ship production software.

My current focus is the internal developer platform as a product: self-service paths, clear guardrails instead of gatekeepers, continuous delivery and reliability. I stay close to the code.

Earlier in my career I was architecture lead for a cloud-native policy-administration platform and moved it from six-month release cycles to fully automated weekly releases, using feature toggles and shift-left quality. As Chief Software Architect at Topaz Technologies, I led a team of about 20 engineers spread across continents through a complete rebuild of a pre-clinical studies platform for pharmaceutical companies, built on Event Sourcing and CQRS and delivered on time and on budget.

I start from a shared model of how the business actually works, usually with EventModeling, and build the platforms, practices and teams that let product teams deliver on their own. I write about that, about AI in the software lifecycle, and about governance and auditability in regulated industries.

I’m a Docker Captain and the author of seven technical books on containers, Kubernetes and software development (see Publications). I wrote one of the two forewords to Martin Dilger’s Understanding Eventsourcing; the other is by Adam Dymitruk, the creator of Event Modeling. I hold a Ph.D. and a Master’s degree in Physics from ETH Zurich. I live in Appenzell, Switzerland.