Lucas Nothnagel

I build the environment in which teams ship hardware, software and AI products.

Engineering lead near Bremen, Germany. Currently Engineering Manager at the Tentamus Innovation Hub, where a product made of industrial cameras, a cloud platform and AI went from a stalled project into laboratory production in under a year.

mail@lucasnothnagel.de LinkedIn

What I do

I take end-to-end technical responsibility where product, team and processes still have to be built or reorganised. That has meant designing the architecture, setting up the team's way of working, choosing what to build and what to buy, and explaining all of it to people who do not write code but pay for it.

The part I am best at is the development environment in the wide sense: API contracts with generated code, pipelines with security scanning, infrastructure as code, and guardrails that let AI coding agents work autonomously inside quality gates. When that environment is right, a team of four ships like a team of ten and every change stays traceable.

Track record

  1. 2025 to now

    Engineering Manager, Tentamus Innovation Hub, Bremen

    Technical and line-management responsibility for a product team across software, hardware and AI in the innovation unit of a global laboratory group. Took an image-based capture and AI extraction system into production, rebuilt the team after a restructuring, and designed the review process that keeps every AI output auditable.

  2. 2023 to 2025

    Lead Developer and Solution Architect, hmmh, Bremen

    Technical lead of a 20 to 30 person commerce unit: engineering and quality processes, a shared foundation for around 20 client projects, platform selections for programmes up to 1.5 million euros, and the technical side of around 15 pitches, half of them to executive boards.

  3. 2021 to 2023

    Software Engineer, hmmh, Bremen

    Lead developer on a Shopware platform for an Austrian retailer; first unit-wide work on agile practice, monitoring and automation.

  4. 2020 to 2021

    Software Engineer, QOSSMIC, Hamburg

    Symfony consulting at Germany's Symfony specialist: legacy migrations and architecture overhauls for clients in industry, education and e-commerce.

  5. 2017 to 2020

    Apprenticeship in application development, hmmh

    Completed early. The training project, a location-based time-tracking tool, won a Consultix award and was the first thing I built that I loved.

How I work

Contracts, pipelines and guardrails over heroics.
Spec-first APIs with generated code, security scanning in every build, reproducible infrastructure. The system should make the right thing the easy thing.
AI as an engineering discipline.
Coding agents get maximum autonomy inside quality gates we build for them. Models in production get a human in the loop and a complete audit trail, especially where regulation applies.
Decisions with numbers attached.
Make-or-buy, total cost of ownership, pricing built on cost forecasts. Preferences are not arguments.
Technology explained so that the people who pay for it can decide.
No jargon, no condescension. Half of my pitches were to boards; the ones we lost still asked for the technical part.

Evidence

Go, TypeScript, Python, PHP. Google Cloud, Terraform, OpenAPI, computer vision, LLM applications. German and English; my team works in English.

Get in touch

For roles, projects or a conversation about auditable AI and developer platforms: mail@lucasnothnagel.de. A full CV is available on request. Deutsch ist ebenso willkommen.