Rostock, Germany

Hi, I’m Jan.

I study computer science in Rostock and work in research and software development: on AI agents that read legacy code, on sensor systems for animal health, and on replacing a legacy Java stack with Django.

AI, IoT or plain software engineering: the label matters less to me than the problem. I just like solving them, preferably ones that have to survive outside a demo, whether that is in a barn, on a microcontroller, or inside somebody else’s legacy codebase.

Jan Victornino Grundl

Background

I finished my B.Sc. in computer science at the University of Rostock in 2025 and stayed on for the master’s, with a focus on AI and software engineering. The bachelor took me longer than the standard seven semesters, because I was working alongside it to help support my family.

I write Python and PyTorch for the machine learning side, Django and PostgreSQL for backends, and C or C++ when the target is an ESP32 or a Raspberry Pi. The part I like most is the seam between them: turning a noisy sensor reading into something a system can actually act on.

I have also taught on and off since 2023, running tutorials for prospective students in the university’s Junior Study programme and volunteering for STEM courses at BYTE Challenge.

Selected projects

A wall of library bookshelves

fablr

Mobile app, 2026

A book app for people who spend more time picking a book than reading one. React Native and Supabase, matching on what a story actually does instead of on its cover.

The gatehouse of a German waterworks

Nordwasser telematics

Practice transfer, 2026

A Summer of Solutions practice-transfer project with Nordwasser GmbH, alongside Fraunhofer IGP and The Future Living. I owned the technical concept, architecture and data protection in a team of five: a vendor-independent telematics concept for 138 vehicles over OBD dongles, keeping the data in-house, delivered as a 40+ page specification with a cost-benefit calculation, CO₂ estimate and rollout plan.

A patient monitor showing vital-sign waveforms

Vitals from video

Hackathon, Jul 2026

Healthcare Hackathon Berlin, on a case with caire: estimating vital parameters from video with remote PPG, plus LLM-based evaluation and alerting tied into the patient history.

Source code on a computer monitor

Aline AI Core

Hackathon, Apr 2026

Top 3 of over 300 participants on a Finanz Informatik case. An agent that reads a business requirement, splits it into developer tasks, and opens the pull requests for them.

A calf standing in a barn

Calf health sensing

Research, ongoing

A smart jacket for calves, built from Arduino and Raspberry Pi hardware, that watches for early signs of respiratory illness, with a PyTorch and OpenCV pipeline behind it. Annotated in CVAT, tested in a real barn.

A quadcopter drone in flight against the sky

Drones over 5G, simulated

Network modelling, 2025

A discrete-event OMNeT++ model of drones talking to each other over a 5G network: how the link holds up under load, with throughput and latency measured rather than guessed at. Built as a university project.

A stethoscope on a plain background

ArbiterMed-MCP

Agent tooling, Apr 2026

An MCP server with no dependencies that gives a general model a medical reference to work from, including structured extraction of the statistics buried in papers.

A neural network drawn around a chip

nano-gpt2

Learning project, Apr 2026

GPT-2 written from scratch in PyTorch, because reading about attention is not the same as implementing it. Embeddings, causal multi-head attention, training loop.

An ESP32 development board

ESP32 encrypted chat

Hardware, 2026

Two ESP32 boards talking to each other with encrypted messages, no router and no internet anywhere in between.

The circuit board of a FRITZ!Box 7490

FRITZ!Box 7490 teardown

Security research, 2026

Reverse engineering my own router: the FTP boot window accepts an unsigned image before any authentication, which is enough to recover stored credentials from a device you have physical access to. Claude Code helped as a static analyser on the firmware.

Personal hardware, write-up on request
A glass RFID transponder tag with its copper antenna coil

rfidpoll

Open source

A small open-source tool for polling and reading RFID tags from a reader, made to be simple to script against rather than a heavy framework.

The working record

Download as PDF

Experience

Feb 2026 to now

Student Research Assistant

  • Built an IoT sensor system on Arduino and Raspberry Pi for the early detection of respiratory illness in calves.
  • Developed the ML pipelines in PyTorch and OpenCV, annotated the data in CVAT, and ran the evaluations on site.
  • Work package AP 6 of KI-TIERWOHL, a €5 million excellence-research consortium funded from the ERDF programme of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
Dec 2025 to now

Student Research Assistant

  • Researched, built and benchmarked custom AI agents for legacy code understanding, across Python and Java codebases.
  • Also developed a Java2PlantUML tool; built the dataset and implemented the system in Python with the Hugging Face stack.
Jul 2026 to now

Software Engineer (IoT/ERP/POS)

  • Architecting, integrating and developing a new ERP/POS system, including migration to a new database, to replace a legacy platform and modernise operations for a 920-berth marina — the largest in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and one of the largest in Germany — with the goal of creating a digital twin of the marina.
  • Handling end-to-end requirements engineering, working directly with management and stakeholders to translate business operations into the technical migration roadmap.
Apr 2026 to Jul 2026

Practice-transfer project with Nordwasser GmbH

  • Responsible for technical concept, architecture and data protection in a team of five master’s students; one of 13 practice partners and 60+ students in the 2026 cohort.
  • Designed a vendor-independent telematics concept for 138 vehicles over OBD dongles, keeping the data in-house; delivered a 40+ page specification with a cost-benefit calculation, CO₂ estimate and rollout plan.
Nov 2025 to Jun 2026

AI Developer

  • Annotated MRI scans in 3D Slicer for AI-assisted breast cancer detection.
  • Ran the quality assurance side: testing, bug fixing and model validation.
May 2025 to Nov 2025

Teaching Assistant

  • Planned, recorded and edited modular teaching videos on computer architecture.
Sep 2023 to Nov 2025

Tutor

  • Taught 30+ prospective CS students a semester on AI basics, maths and programming: tutorials, exercise sessions, hands-on labs and walk-throughs of the material.
  • Developed the course materials myself.
Jul 2020 to Sep 2022

Sales Associate, part time

  • Where I learned to show up early, deal with all kinds of people, and keep things running on a busy morning.

Education

Since Oct 2025

M.Sc. Computer Science

  • Focus on AI, software engineering and IoT. Current average 1.7 on the German scale; expected to finish in Apr 2027.
Oct 2020 to Oct 2025

B.Sc. Computer Science

  • Final grade 2.4, thesis 1.3 on the German scale.
  • Extended past the standard seven semesters while working alongside it to help support my family.
Until Jun 2020

Abitur

Schulcampus Evershagen, Rostock

Volunteering

A stretch of the river Warnow in Mecklenburg

NALA-AI

Open source

An open platform that turns cheap sensors into live maps of German rivers. I contribute code; the project was shown at re:publica 2026.

A BBC micro:bit educational microcontroller board

BYTE Challenge

Teaching

Free online STEM courses for school students who might otherwise never see a line of code. Run by volunteers under the Gesellschaft für Informatik.

The main building of the University of Rostock

Student council

University politics

Elected member of the student council (StuRa) at the University of Rostock, and a member of the Gesellschaft für Informatik.

Beyond code

Conferences, long books, and dwarf colonies that end badly. I train to clear my head and read to fill it again.

Jan at work Conference badge

Games

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader

Rogue Trader 40k

A long CRPG in the Koronus Expanse, where most decisions are bad and you pick anyway.

Langrisser I and II

Langrisser I & II

Old tactical RPGs. Unit matchups, terrain, and story paths that fork properly.

Dwarf Fortress

Dwarf Fortress

Losing is fun. A colony simulated down to the last detail, right up to the moment it collapses.

Books

The Dwarves

The Dwarves

Markus Heitz on Tungdil Goldhand and the defence of Girdlegard.

Conan the Barbarian

Conan the Barbarian

Robert E. Howard’s original sword and sorcery stories, still the best of the genre.

Monarchies of God

Monarchies of God

Paul Kearney’s gunpowder fantasy about war, religion and discovery.

Get in touch

If you want to get in touch, just write me. A project, a research idea, a job, or an argument about fantasy books are all welcome. I am based in Rostock and happy to work remotely.

janvictorninogrundl@gmail.com