Julian Fleck
Curriculum Vitae
Curriculum Vitae
AboutCV
My 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. I tend to arrive at problems from unexpected angles and have 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 | Founder & Developer | Recurse | Sense-making substrate for AI work. Relationship-based retrieval, provenance tracking, and context injection built on RAGE (Recursive, Agentic Graph Embeddings). |
| 2024 — present | Consultant & Engineer | OECD | CompassGPT, a policy research agent for the science and technology policy division. Also building a data collection pipeline for the STIP (Science, Technology and Innovation Policy) survey. |
| 2023 | Designer & Developer | Hunch | Visual programming interface for AI workflow orchestration — chaining models, managing context, inspecting intermediate outputs. |
| 2022 | Product Lead, Architect & Designer | Tweetscape at roote.co | Graph-based social network analysis interface. Wrote the architecture specs and led product direction. Users control algorithmic feeds through spatial clustering and topic navigation. |
| 2020 – 2021 | Lead Designer & Developer | 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. |
| 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 | Sunsten | Strategic technology consultancy helping organizations navigate complex technology decisions. |
| 2017 | Research & Design | Metasphere | Speculative framework for turning complex knowledge into navigable spatial terrains. |
| 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. |
| 2010 – 2016 | Brand Designer | hinterhoflinks (Design Studio) | Networked studio setup with friends. Practical design work — primarily typesetting and corporate design. Began gravitating toward systematic and procedural approaches. |
| 2009 – 2010 | Brand Designer | formvermittlung | Founded a corporate design agency after graduating. Moved on quickly — the agency model wasn’t the right fit. |
| 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. |
| 2000 – 2006 | Systems Administrator | webrelations (Internet Service Provider) | Got into the web 1.0 industry early through the Chaos Computer Club and the hacker community. |
| 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 | 26+ |
| 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, HTML/CSS/JavaScript |
| Backend | Neo4j, PostgreSQL, Node.js, Python |
| AI & NLP | spaCy, Transformers, LangChain, Llamaindex, Anthropic/OpenAI APIs |
| Design & Prototyping | Figma, Framer, Webflow, Protopie |
| Visual | Figma, Adobe Creative Suite |
Key Projects
Key Projects
- Recurse — User-owned context layer for AI work: relationship-based retrieval, provenance, proxy context injection
- 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
- 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