Kai Krause
About
Detail
VP Engineering & AI
Switzerland
Résumé
Jobs
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VP Engineering & AISpeechifyMar 2024 - Current (2 years 7 months)Engineering leadership for Speechify's consumer platform and AI infrastructure. 50M+ users, millions of daily requests.
Rearchitected a fragile, duct-taped inference stack into a production-grade serving platform - cut latency by 20-30%, reduced serving costs by ~40%, introduced proper capacity planning, and eliminated constant outages. Grew what started as a 2-person payments squad into the company's platform team - now owns the entire backend: auth, subscriptions, library, content pipelines, inference, and every API the product teams ship on top of. Designed and launched Speechify's TTS API platform.
Took a siloed team and restructured it around shared goals and clearer ownership. Replaced third-party churn tooling w- Principal EngineerSpeechifyMar 2022 - Feb 2024 (2 years)Owned the hardest problems across platform, payments, and AI.
Built the audiobooks backend from scratch - 500K+ titles from top publishers, BISG-compliant reporting, cross-platform checkout. Basically built Audible's infrastructure in a fraction of the time.
Architected the AI Studio and dubbing backend - full pipeline across ASR, TTS, and transcoding.
On the payments side: reduced Stripe passive churn by 45% (1.7x above target), unified 74 subscription events into 17 (10x lifecycle revenue), shipped 1-Click Checkout (35% conversion lift), replaced RevenueCat with in-house system.
Implemented engineering controls for SOC 2 Type 2 certification. Cut 96% of wasted logging costs in an afternoon. Kill - Senior Blockchain Engineer (Contract)DiversifyioMar 2021 - Dec 2021 (10 months)Contract work during the crypto boom. Built smart contract infrastructure for a DeFi project managing $50M+ in assets.
What I shipped:
→ 5 production smart contracts (ERC20 token, vaults, reward distribution, seed sale)
→ Solidity with 95% test coverage, full Hardhat typing for maintainability
→ Next.js web3 app for token sales, processed $10M+ in funding rounds
→ Transparent proxy architecture for upgradeable contracts
Open source: github.com/Diversify-io/diversify-core
This was a side project to learn blockchain/Web3 during the 2021 crypto wave. Learned smart contract s - Staff Engineer (Advisory/Consulting)EasyCodeIT AGJan 2020 - Jan 2022 (2 years 1 month)Part-time advisory role during leadership transition after leaving CTO position to join Eloq.
Maintained platform stability and drove infrastructure improvements while new CTO ramped up.
Key contributions:
→ Zero production-critical failures during 2-year transition period
→ 5× performance improvements via Azure optimization
→ React Native mobile app development for client projects
Stayed on because the platform needed continuity and the technical problems were interesting. - Senior Solution Architect (Consulting)NHC Connector AGApr 2019 - Jan 2022 (2 years 10 months)Part-time consulting role building healthcare data infrastructure for 500,000+ patients. NHC was founded by another ECIT engineer - I helped get them off the ground while serving as CTO at Eloq.
What I built:
→ Centralized healthcare data platform integrating EHR, billing, and operational systems
→ GraphQL API enabling real-time analytics across 500K+ patient records
→ Operating room material tracking PWA (automated accounting, reduced manual errors)
→ Migration from on-premise to Azure, cutting infrastructure costs 45%
→ Automation eliminating 2 FTE worth of manual maintenance work
Impact: 15% reduction in operational material costs, 99.99% reliability SLA, 50% less downtime.
Health - CTOEloq GmbHJun 2018 - Feb 2022 (3 years 9 months)Led technology for a web/ecommerce agency focused on rapid client delivery.
Built the entire cloud infrastructure to serve 30-40 client sites with a 4-5 person team. The challenge: scale agency operations without scaling headcount.
What I built:
→ Automated hosting platform with zero-touch updates
→ Shared code abstractions and boilerplate system to ship sites in days, not weeks
→ Internal tooling that turned manual processes into autopilot operations
→ Infrastructure redesign cutting costs by 40% while improving reliability
The result: 35% YoY revenue growth driven by operational efficiency. We could deliver more, faster, with the same small team.
This role taught me how to bu - CTOEasyCodeIT AGJan 2018 - Dec 2019 (2 years)Led technical strategy for WebFrame, an ambitious SaaS suite competing with Shopify, Mailchimp, and WordPress (EasyShop, EasyNews, EasyWeb, headless CMS modules).
Owned everything: architecture, infrastructure, team scaling, technical execution.
What I built/shipped:
→ Multi-tenant white-label SaaS platform
→ Full DevOps transformation: Git, CI/CD, Docker/Rancher, automated deployments
→ Cloud migration to Azure cutting infrastructure costs 40%
→ High-profile client projects (SwissHomeGuard home security platform)
→ Nearshore development team delivering on aggressive timelines
The product was technically solid. GTM challenges (Swiss market focus, CEO direction) led to team split. I l - Senior Software Engineer (Founding Engineer)EasyCodeIT AGAug 2015 - Dec 2017 (2 years 5 months)Employee #1. Built WebFrame from 0→1 and scaled it to production.
Shipped everything: mobile apps (Xamarin C#), backend APIs (REST/ASP.NET), modern frontend, multi-tenant SaaS architecture, and custom build automation.
Key milestones:
→ Designed and built core modules (Shopify clone, Mailchimp alternative, WordPress competitor, headless CMS)
→ Introduced modern dev infrastructure: Git, CI/CD (Jira/Bamboo), Docker/Rancher
→ Built deployment pipelines scaling to hundreds of customer environments
→ Delivered complex client projects alongside product work
This was my founding engineer experience - learned - Software EngineerUNICAug 2013 - Jul 2015 (2 years)Agency work building custom SharePoint and ASP.NET solutions for 20+ enterprise clients.
What I shipped:
→ Migrated 60+ repositories from Subversion to Git with zero downtime
→ Automated development workflows: code scaffolding, 1-click prod→local data sync
→ Custom enterprise solutions for blue-chip clients
This role taught me how to ship fast in enterprise environments, deal with legacy systems, and automate away pain. - System EngineerGlas Trösch GroupAug 2011 - Jul 2013 (2 years)IT infrastructure and support for 100+ employees.
Automated software distribution, built monitoring systems, reduced downtime 25%.
Early career role - learned systems thinking, automation, and how to support users at scale.
Education
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- MSc Business Information SystemsUniversity of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland FHNWJan 2019 - Jan 2021 (2 years 1 month)
- Bachelor of Science in WirtschaftsinformatikUniversity of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland FHNWJan 2016 - Jan 2019 (3 years 1 month)
Awards
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- I10th Place - BestStudent Challenge SwitzerlandIssued by Staufenbiel Institut
Publications
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- CSQL Scrolls - A Reusable and Extensible DGBL ExperimentCSERC The th Computer Science Education Research Conference NovThe teaching of databases and SQL is an active research area. We contribute by presenting a reusable and extensible SQL teaching experiment which uses a game and fits the paradigm of digital game based learning (DGBL). Although DGBL is hampered partly by the difficulty of obtaining statistically significant empirical results, the research shows that it may be an effective learning method and that it is in demand. We investigate the acceptance and effectiveness of an SQL learning game and focus on two areas: student reaction to games as a vehicle for teaching, and educational effectiveness. We designed a game prototype and administered a pre test, post test and an acceptance survey, with seven part-time and sixteen full-time students. A stat
- IA Comparison of Nearest Distance Optimization and Ant Colony Optimization for Order Picking in a Multi-Aisle WarehouseISMSI th International Conference on Intelligent Systems Metaheuristics Swarm Intelligence AprToday, warehouses and the IT infrastructure behind them ensure smooth processing of customer orders throughout the day in all supply chains. These orders can consist of one item up to hundreds of items. The size and heterogeneity of warehouses also impedes the fastest possible processing of all orders. This research compares the nearest distance optimization heuristic and ant colony optimization to find out whether one or the other route leads to faster picking times in several scenarios depending on the warehouse size or the number of items on the picking list. For this purpose, we chose the widespread multi-aisle layout of a warehouse for our study assuming that only one human worker is involved in picking the items on the list.