paul burkhardt

Half engineer, half researcher, curious about how AI thinks. Computer scientist with stops at TU Munich, UC Berkeley, Mannheim, and NUS. Looking into research in computer vision and AI systems.

Finishing the last quarter of my M.Sc. at TUM. Looking into research in computer vision and AI systems, ideally for a master's thesis abroad.

I've been working with AI agents since 2023 and try new models and frameworks as soon as I can get my hands on them.
Jan ~ May 2026

fifteenA

Cofounder

Built an AI outbound engine with my cofounder Mustafa — a dedicated BDR team, working 24/7. Watched the internet for real buying signals, wrote outreach tuned to each lead's pain points, and booked qualified meetings straight into customers' calendars. Shipped to production with paying pilots and outcome-based pricing.

Jun ~ Aug 2024

Knowunity · Series B

AI Backend Engineering Intern

End-to-end AI product engineering for 2M weekly active users. Built RAG pipelines, custom models, and image embedding infrastructure. Took over backend engineering for the US team rollout. Did everything from product specs and AI experiments to shipping in the app.

Apr ~ May 2024

BCG Platinion

Visiting Associate

Helped scale the tech organization at a growing IoT unicorn. Saw firsthand how scaleup ops run, and how much of it could be automated. Validated the conviction behind fifteenA.

Aug ~ Dec 2023

Adago

Working Student, Cloud & Software Engineering

Built the AWS infrastructure (Batch, S3, Lambda, Aurora) powering an ML-driven digital twin for a DAX40 client. End-to-end ownership from Palantir Foundry data pipelines to production deployment.

Feb ~ Apr 2023

Langfuse · YC W23, acquired by ClickHouse

Founding Intern (Employee #1)

First employee at the LLM observability startup. Shipped full-stack features (Next.js, React, tRPC) during the product-market fit phase. Now 20K+ GitHub stars, 26M+ monthly SDK installs.

2024 ~

TU Munich & UC Berkeley

M.Sc. Computer Science · GPA 1.2 German (~3.8 US)
Coursework: Applied Foundation Models in Computer Vision · Computer Vision & Computational Photography · Deep Learning · Machine Learning · Agentic AI · Machine Learning in Neuroimaging
Top 2%
Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes · Rohde Stiftung · Adam Haker Stiftung
2024 ~

CDTM

Honors Degree in Technology Management · GPA 1.1 German (~3.9 US)
~4% acceptance rate
2020 ~ 2024

University of Mannheim & NUS

B.Sc. Information Systems · GPA 1.2 German (~3.8 US)
Thesis: Evaluation of Chain-of-Thought Prompting on the Task of Entity Matching
Seminar: Graph Neural Networks — State-of-the-Art and Applications
Top 2% · Deutschlandstipendium Scholar

Opus

AI-powered workforce platform automating HR, customer support, and analytics via Slack and email integration. Built with Mustafa in 48 hours.

AI Agentsn8nReactSupabaseVAPI

PathPilot

Computer vision system for visually impaired navigation. Uses Mast3r-SLAM, SAM, YOLO, and BLIP for dense 3D reconstruction, collision detection, instance segmentation, and object tracking to provide real-time auditory guidance for obstacle avoidance.

PythonPyTorchComputer Vision3D Reconstruction

Autotoon

AI app that generates personalized comic books where kids are the main character in their own story. Built it for my nephew, now his friends love it too.

Next.jsAI Image GenerationVercel

Computational Photography

Deep dives into computational photography from Berkeley's CS 180. Face morphing, seamless image blending, panoramic mosaics built from scratch, and neural radiance fields , all implemented from the ground up.

PythonNumPyComputer VisionNeRF
Winner, CDTM Hacks
Opus: AI workforce platform (with Mustafa)
Winner, Q-Summit Hackathon
AWS challenge, beat 50+ teams (with Mustafa)
Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes
Germany's most prestigious merit-based scholarship (top 0.5%)
Deutschlandstipendium, Rohde Stiftung, Adam Haker Stiftung
National and university merit-based scholarships