Julian Fleck
Curriculum Vitae
Curriculum Vitae
AboutCV
I’m an independent AI systems designer. I build infrastructure and interfaces that let AI actually remember, learn, and get more knowledgeable over time — persistent memory systems, knowledge graphs, and agent architectures for human-machine and inter-agent collaboration. In conversations I sometimes call this “building external brains.”
The path started in the hacker communities of the early internet, moved through systems administration and frontend development, then into visual design and branding. Over the past decade that trajectory has folded back on itself — reconnecting technical foundations with design practice to work on knowledge systems, spatial interfaces, and human-AI interaction. The unusual path means I bridge domains that rarely overlap and tend to arrive at problems from unexpected angles, with a track record of implementing concepts (auto-associative workspaces, context-aware interfaces, spatial knowledge representation) before they entered wider conversation.
CV
CV
| Period | Position | Organization | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 — present | Principal Investigator | RAGE — Recursive Agentic Graph Embeddings | Independent research testbed for dynamic systems over dynamic graphs — continuous dynamics like attention, decay, and phase signatures running over a substrate whose own typing and topology co-evolve. Focused on what stable measurement surfaces can be defined for multi-agent observability. Empirical anchor for the Schmidt Sciences 2026 Trustworthy AI submission. |
| 2024 — present | Lead Engineer | Recurse | A frame-based knowledge graph for working with your own materials. Built on frames — typed, recursively composable semantic units with named slots and attached procedures (after Minsky and Fillmore) — that compose at every scale, from individual concepts to entire workspaces. Typing and structure emerge from your materials and from use rather than being declared top-down; frames also carry their own traversal instructions. |
| 2024 — present | Affiliated Researcher | Atlas Research Group | Affiliated researcher contributing to substrate-level multi-agent coordination research. Focus: pre-behavioral observability in multi-agent systems — substrate architecture, instrumentation, and frame-graph systems for detecting coordination dynamics before they surface as behavioral failures. |
| 2026 — present | Advisory Board Member, STIP Compass Technology Sounding Board | OECD | Member of the Science, Technology and Innovation Policy division’s standing advisory body on emerging-technology questions. Advise on future architecture decisions, data processes, and new forms of interaction with STIP Compass data. |
| 2024 — present | AI Engineer & Consultant | OECD | Develop and maintain CompassGPT, a policy research agent for the science and technology policy division. Also building an agentic data collection and survey management pipeline for the STIP (Science, Technology and Innovation Policy) survey. |
| 2025 — present | Lead Engineer & Designer | masked.chat | Privacy-preserving chat application with real-time PII detection and redaction. Investigates how AI-mediated communication can maintain epistemic integrity under adversarial data-leakage conditions, treating the detection and substitution pipeline as the research instrument rather than the product. |
| 2025 — present | Lead Engineer | worldwire | Empirical platform for studying topic propagation and information dynamics in live news corpora. BERTopic clustering and Louvain community detection over a continuous article ingestion pipeline with Wikidata entity resolution, producing a real-time epistemic landscape of the news cycle. |
| 2023 | Senior HCI Designer | Hunch | Visual programming interface for AI workflow orchestration — chaining models, managing context, inspecting intermediate outputs. Contributed early interaction design and explored deeper potential for AI as a thinking partner. |
| 2021 – 2022 | Design Systems & Interaction Designer | Wonder | Brought in after Wonder‘s 2021 brand redesign to build out the UI design system for a spatial video-conferencing platform supporting hundreds of concurrent users. Authored a set of proxemics-informed Kinetic Principles — avatar dynamics, organic group formation, embodied movement — for the spatial interaction layer. |
| 2021 – 2022 | Product Lead, Architect & Designer | Tweetscape at roote.co | Graph-based social network analysis interface funded by roote.co. Wrote the architecture specs and led product direction. Users control their feed recommendation algorithm through network analysis, spatial clustering, and topic modeling. |
| 2020 – 2021 | Design Lead, Data Scientist | ECCHR Explore | Led an assembled team to turn legal podcast episodes into interactive maps of ideas and connections for the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. Early implementation of GraphRAG. |
| 2020 – 2021 | Project Lead | Metasphere | Picked the project back up during COVID with a small team. Built an interactive topic explorer over the CORD-19 scientific-literature dataset, mapping interrelations between papers through embeddings and topic modeling. Early applied test of embedding-space navigation as a reading interface. |
| 2018 – 2022 | Design Director | Ape Unit (Digital Agency) | Led design across blockchain and web3 projects. Built spatial interfaces, worked with NLP and embedding visualizations, connected design research with applied development. Notable project: æternity education platform. |
| 2019 – 2021 | Co-founder, Managing Partner | Sunsten | “Navigational” consultancy for decision-makers in emerging-technology landscapes. Mapped the early web3/blockchain project ecosystem using NLP over whitepapers and surrounding discourse — turning a hyped, opaque field into a legible terrain for strategic decisions. Delivered through tooling and workshops. |
| 2017 – 2019 | Principal Designer & Researcher | Metasphere | Self-directed research project on spatial knowledge representation: turning unstructured document corpora into navigable terrains using topic modeling, embedding spaces, and rule-based layout. Built both the NLP backend and the visual/interaction primitives end-to-end. The origin point of the research line that runs through ECCHR Explore, Tweetscape, Recurse, and the present RAGE work — the first sustained effort to treat knowledge architecture and retrieval as a coupled design-and-engineering problem. |
| 2014 – 2016 | Lecturer, Information Design & Data Visualization | Design Factory International | Weekly lectures and workshops on information design, data visualization, emerging technologies (AI, VR), and mapping techniques. The research on knowledge representation and cartography from these years informed later work deeply. |
| 2010 – 2016 | Design Director | hinterhoflinks (Design Studio) | Networked studio with friends, working for cultural institutions and corporate clients. Core practice on generative and procedural design and the construction of design systems — rule-based visual systems, parametric brand frameworks, code-driven asset generation. Conventional corporate design and typesetting (including a lot of annual reports) ran alongside and sustained the studio while the systems practice deepened. |
| 2009 – 2010 | Brand Designer, Partner | formvermittlung | Co-founded a corporate design agency after graduating. Brand strategy, design systems, and early experiments in generative branding. |
| 2006 – 2009 | Communication Design (Degree) | Design Factory International | Studied communications design. Freelanced as a graphic designer to cover tuition. |
| 2004 – 2007 | Frontend Developer | freistiil (Advertising Agency) | Frontend development in the early days of modern web development. This job got me gravitating toward user interface design. |
| 2000 – 2006 | Systems Administrator / Pen Tester | webrelations (Internet Service Provider) | Got into web 1.0 early through the Chaos Computer Club and hacker community. Proxy services and caching, mail server hardening, offsite backup strategies. |
| 1984 | Born | Northern Germany | Son of an architect — grew up around materials and models at different scales. |
Skills
Skills
| Skill Area | Proficiency | Years |
|---|---|---|
| Knowledge Architecture & Retrieval Systems | Expert | 10+ |
| Systems Architecture & Infrastructure | Advanced | 20+ |
| NLP Pipelines | Advanced | 8+ |
| AI Agents | Advanced | 6+ |
| Information Architecture & Design | Expert | 12+ |
| Spatial Interfaces | Expert | 9+ |
| Frontend / UI Development | Advanced | 22+ |
| Graph Databases & Backend | Advanced | 8+ |
| Data Visualization | Advanced | 12+ |
Technologies
Technologies
| Category | Technologies |
|---|---|
| Frontend | React, TypeScript, Next.js, Tailwind, D3.js, Three.js / WebGL, HTML/CSS/JavaScript |
| Backend | PostgreSQL, Neo4j, FastAPI, Node.js, Python, Bun/Deno |
| AI & NLP | Anthropic SDK (incl. MCP), OpenAI APIs, LangChain, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, spaCy, Transformers, sentence-transformers, BERTopic |
| Retrieval & memory | Qdrant, pgvector, Pinecone, Neo4j, GraphRAG patterns, frame-based knowledge representations |
| Data mining & graph analysis | Playwright (web scraping), custom scraping pipelines, Gephi |
| Design & Prototyping | Figma, Framer, Webflow, Adobe Creative Suite |
Key Projects
Key Projects
- RAGE (Recursive Agentic Graph Embeddings) — Independent research testbed for dynamic systems over dynamic graphs
- Recurse — Frame-based knowledge graph with emergent typing and traversal-aware frames
- Tweetscape — Graph-based social network analysis putting users in control of algorithmic feeds
- Hunch — Visual programming interface for AI workflow orchestration
- Trails — Personal knowledge interface that learns from usage patterns
- masked.chat — Privacy-preserving chat with real-time PII detection and redaction; AI-mediated communication under adversarial data-leakage conditions
- worldwire — Empirical platform for topic propagation in live news corpora; BERTopic + Louvain + Wikidata entity resolution
- Wonder — Spatial video conferencing using proxemic interaction
- ECCHR Explore — Legal podcasts turned into interactive maps of ideas and connections
- Metasphere — Speculative framework for navigable spatial knowledge terrains
Languages
Languages
- German (native)
- English (full professional proficiency)
Additional Information
Additional Information
Berlin-based, working internationally between Germany, Canada, and China.