Meet the gridscale team

Henrik is gridscale’s CEO. In this function, he is primarily responsible for the strategic development of gridscale, as well as important partnerships. Henrik has experience of 15 years in the hosting industry. In his last role, he took charge of the international realignment of the dedicated server business of one Europe’s largest hosting companies.

As COO Felix is the central point around our products and is responsible that our customers get not only a good but an excellent product. In this role he coordinates between the individual teams and is always at the pulse of time at gridscale.

With his background as a longterm player in the open source scene as well as founder and managing director of an open-source IT infrastructure service provider and hoster, he brings his many years of experience - both technical and commercial - to gridscale at all levels.

When Felix is not active in his gridscale mission, he gets involved as part of the board of the OSB Alliance, attends conferences or sits on a racing bike.

As our CPO, Michael is the central point of contact for our products that turn gridscale into what it is today – from the idea and implementation to the maintenance of existing products. For more than 12 years in the hosting industry, he has always been able to implement ideas with the attitude of “yes, you can”, where others only saw “it does not work” and “we have always done it this way”.

Torsten is responsible for everything around the data center and operations. He is the guy who keeps our systems running, our network with low latency and takes care of our partners and customers with his awesome team.

Torsten has been working for more than 20 years with Unix and Linux server systems and gained a lot of expertise within the hosting industry. Back in 2005, he founded his first web hosting provider for shared web hosting services. In his previous role, he was responsible for the International Network and Systems Department with a competitor.

Frank is responsible for sales and strategic partnerships at gridscale. For more than 30 years, Frank has been at home in the telecommunications-, hosting- and cloud- industries. As a passionate expert, he has been consulting in IT infrastructure projects for years. Frank signs responsible for some of the largest IT infrastructure setups in Europe. Before gridscale, Frank has worked at europe's no. 2 managed hosting provider and has accompanied numerous projects there.

Carsten is responsible for our web-backend development team and takes care of a smooth communication between all components. He joined the gridscale’s founder team in 2015 together with his brother Marc. Before his studies in computer sciences, he and Marc established the Dittmann Media GmbH in 2004. He has been able to realize his love for modern web technologies in many exciting projects.

With his expertise in the field of web front-end, Marc is responsible for all gridscale web applications. He joined gridscale's founding team in 2015 with his brother Carsten. In 2004 the brothers established the Dittmann Media GmbH. The know-how and the experience gained from his computer science studies and the many highly complex projects of the past years make him a leading expert in the field of web front-end.

Tobias has been part of the team since the end of 2014 and is responsible for gridscale’s figures as our CFO. His love for figures and finance is the common theme of his career – from his apprenticeship as a bank clerk to his diploma in business administration and tax consultancy. His many years of professional experience in tax consultancy and a three-year trip to the commercial audit at KPMG form the solid foundation of his business.

Martin is the lead developer of gridscale and responsible for the choice of software components and the design of the intelligent system architecture. He got to know gridscale through long-term contact with the founders, with whom he has already worked successfully in the past.

Before Martin switched into the business world, he worked in the academic field for several years, working on the development of distributed systems, high-performance graph algorithms, and databases. Martin is also extremely versatile outside the field of computer science, as his studies of the secondary subjects of physics and psychology shows.

Marc is our first native English speaker, he was born in South Africa and worked professionally in the U.K as manager of the IT and logistics departments for one of the fastest growing companies in the U.K. Having traveled a lot, he gained a lot of knowledge and capability to expand gridscale even further internationally.

Alida is a working student in software development DevOp. She studies Information Science and Language Technology at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf. Professionally, she also brings technological know-how into the gridscale team. She worked for 2 years as a database/report programmer for a Dusseldorf consulting company and was previously involved in a renowned digital agency based in Dusseldorf Medienhafen in the field of digital marketing for 3 years.

Alida feels in good hands in the digital world and has an affinity for programming.

Marcus supports us as a system administrator in the area of managed hosting. He is primarily responsible for the installation, configuration, and maintenance of customer systems. Incidentally, he is responsible for maintaining the monitoring system.

Thomas is driving the expansion of cloud platforms at gridscale. As an old stager of the hosting industry with a background in software development and DevOps, he knows both classic and modern ailments and is happy to help out with more than just blows. With his love for scalable infrastructure, he is exactly right with gridscale!

Yannik is responsible for SEO and Analytics and ensures that gridscale is found quickly and easily on the net.
Yannik is currently studying Media Informatics at the University of Cologne.
In addition to studying and working, he is interested in everything related to the Internet and digital culture. Since he later wants to market his own video game, he is in good hands in our professional online marketing department.

IT student Florian supports us in marketing development. He makes sure that our content is well received by you and Google. Incidentally, he has the topic of SEO and Google Analytics in view. Florian loves to get to know new tools and also explains them to you in his tutorials.

Jan created websites and applications while still at school. In 2007 he finally turned his hobby into a profession.
At gridscale he mainly takes care of the frontend of the different panels, but he also likes to help out in the backend and the area of the website.

Jan became aware of gridscale through an earlier collaboration with Marc Dittmann and got to know the product as an "Earlybird" tester in 2015. The wish to contribute a part to gridscale himself he put into action in May 2018 - since then he has been part of our team.

Aldemuro is from Indonesia. In 2015, he came to Germany for studying information engineering and computer science before joining gridscale. Since April 2018 he supports the gridscale team as a software developer. Currently, he is responsible for extending test cases for our system and maintaining our API client.

Kristina supports us in various areas, especially in general organization, such as travel and order, but also in Feelgood Management. But there is hardly a topic with which one cannot go to her. She has worked in various corporate cultures, brings a lot of experience with her and keeps track of things.

Philo supports Frank as a working student in the Sales team.
She already holds a bachelor's degree in philosophy and sociology and is now studying "Culture, Aesthetics, Media" as a Master's student. Since communication with other people is very important to her, she perfectly fits into the sales department.

As Senior Account Manager at gridscale, Lisa is responsible for both new and existing customers. 10 years in the hosting & cloud industry and 9 years in sales of a well-known managed hosting provider - Lisa has a lot of experience and fits perfectly into the dynamic and motivated gridscale team.

Deborah - or Debbie for short - is the creative head at gridscale and provides us with fresh designs. Already during her bachelor's degree at Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences, she worked as a working student at Schüco International KG, where she designed the icons for the SchüCal software. After graduating, she gained 5 years of professional experience as a graphic designer at brandbuero Media GmbH and is well versed in programmatic marketing.

Nico is an online marketing manager with a focus on SEO and is responsible for (organic) online marketing at gridscale. At the same time, he is a good example of the fact, that you can not only become a taxi driver by studying literature. He discovered his passion for SEO by chance but has consistently expanded it since then: from startups, agencies to publishing houses, from B2B to B2C, from offpage to onpage.

Sydney is part of the Research & Development team at gridscale.
About 3 years ago, the fire and passion for programming were ignited in him. After a completed apprenticeship in the field of informatics, he now wants to reach for the stars and studies informatics at the FH Bonn-Rhein-Sieg. His biggest dream is to work as a game developer one day.

Begoña - or just Bego is our new Spanish internal developer. Originally from Bilbao, she was living in Cloudy Barcelona before she moved to Sunny Cologne. Before she joined gridscale she was working with several innovative sustainability projects and now returned to the development nation.

Already since the 7th grade, it was clear for Tobi that he wanted to do something with computer science. His career as a web developer started with the first HTML pages while he was at school. During his computer science studies he somehow got stuck in the web area.

At gridscale, he supports Jan & Marc at Frontend, UX & GUI. He knows both of them - like some others from the team - from earlier cooperation. So you always see each other twice in your life.

Since March 2019 he has been part of the team, after having been a customer of gridscale himself before.

Linn is responsible for our People department, i.e. everything that has to do with recruiting and internal processes for gridscale employees. As a career changer, she discovered her heart for IT in 2012 and can now look back on more than seven years of professional experience in HR consulting and HR management.

Originally Marius studied media technology, but a few years ago he started programming with PHP as a career changer. Since March 2019 he is part of the gridscale team, after working for one of our customers for many years.

As a working student, Yuliya supports the marketing team in the areas of event management, PR and social media.
She is studying European Culture and Economy for her Master's degree. Apart from her studies and work, Yuliya is also interested in hand lettering, sports and cinema.

As Head of New Business Development, Daniel is responsible for lead generation at gridscale. He works as an interface between marketing and sales. Together with his team, he ensures that sales are provided with qualified inquiries. Daniel has 10 years of experience in sales and is a telemarketing specialist. At the age of seven, he got his first PC (386) and has been a technology enthusiast ever since.

Zhaleh studies Applied Information Sciences at the TH Cologne and supports us as a working student in the field of online marketing. In her spare time, she likes to go for walks or inline skating.

Julia is responsible for campaign management at gridscale and is therefore mainly responsible for the planning, development, execution, and analysis of marketing campaigns. In addition to her successfully completed studies in economics at the University of Cologne, she brings more than 7 years of know-how from the hosting industry with her.

Martin is our working student in online marketing and supports Nico and his team in SEO matters. He is currently studying information science at the TH Cologne. Besides his work and his studies, he is interested in all topics around digitalization and how to harmonize the environment and economy. In his spare time, he likes to run, cycle or climb somewhere.

Ibrahim holds a Ph.D. degree in IT system engineering from the University of Potsdam in Germany. His research focused on green computing and resource management in Cloud Computing. He is the author and co-author of different scientific papers in the field of Cloud Computing.

He has several years of experience in software development and DevOps in Cloud platforms, He is passionate about designing scalable, resilient, and cost-effective solutions.

Manuel primarily provides technical support to our customers. But he also supports the Ops&DC team in managed hosting or spontaneously where his skills are needed.

As an Inside Sales Expert, Nino supports the New Business Development team in the Lead Generation area. As an interface between marketing and sales, he helps to qualify potential customers and inspire them for the best company in the world. As a trained banker, he already has a lot of experience in the field of sales and could further deepen his know-how through his business studies.

Tom is from Vietnam but he already lived in the UK for 5 years and finished his bachelor's degree in Software Engineering there two years ago. He went back to Vietnam to found his own company, based on the development of a facebook crawler. In 2018 he decided to come to Germany for higher education and currently he studies Computer Science in Bonn. Tom has experience with Golang and actively supports our team with this knowledge. He is working on our Go-Client SDK as well as on our Terraform provider.

Torsten has been in the IT industry for more than two decades. During this time he worked as a freelancer and for companies like i22, Really Bytes / TWT or T-Mobile. Most recently he worked as DevOps Engineer at Toom. As a Cloud Architect, he now shares his experience within our team.

As a working student, Arash supports the software development team in the area of backend development and concentrates on algorithms, artificial intelligence and machine learning. He is currently doing his Master's in Computer Science at the University of Bonn.

As Head of Finance, Henning’s responsibilities are strategic controlling, planning, and M&A. With his background in corporate finance, strategy and commercial due diligence as well as experience in the SaaS business, he ensures the basis of indicator-based corporate management and is the contact person for finance-related topics.
If Henning isn’t absorbed in excel-sheets, he spends his free days ski touring and mountain biking in the alps.

Hardy supports us in recruiting people and the Candidate Journey, from the first contact with candidates to the onboarding of new employees. He is also responsible for several tasks in office management that ensure satisfied employees and a pleasant working environment. Hardy joined us as a career changer after working in the outdoor sector for a long time and making a detour to technical customer support.

As Marketing Director Jens takes care of press and public relations, keeps close contacts to IT analysts and cloud industry associations. He is also responsible for all product marketing activities including the conceptual design of the accompanying marketing campaigns and events. Having finished his banking apprenticeship, his economic studies as well as his MBA degree at Bradford University, he started his professional career at a technology-driven consulting company. From 2000 to 2019 Jens was responsible as CMO and divisional director for marketing, corporate communication and investor relations at two listed Cologne-based cloud companies, Pironet AG and QSC AG.

Ratan worked as a game web developer before joining gridscale. Now she works as a frontend developer in our team.

Mubashirul is currently working as a working student in Team JS. Based on the knowledge he gained during his bachelor’s studies he is learning advanced front-end development. After completing his bachelors he interned at AWS as Linux and Hardware Engineer and then worked full time in Tata Technologies as Trainee. After coming to Germany he worked as a student assistant in Max Planck Institue for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn. Currently, he is pursuing M.Sc. Media Informatics at RWTH Aachen

Jan Frederik was also a PHP developer even before he came to gridscale. And before that, and before that. Besides, he is an alternative practitioner for psychotherapy and wanted to open his own business. Luckily, he didn't do that, so he can now support our team with his many years of knowledge as a PHP developer.

Laura is responsible for various different areas: Organization, purchasing of office supplies, travel planning, office expansion on boarding process and many other topics. She replaces Kristina for a while and is then going to work with her hand in hand.

As Head of Operations he is responsible for our OPS-Team. Before that he was Head of IT-Europe and as Global Director Enterprise Architecture in charge for the BoD (Board of Directors) meeting once a month.

Benjamin is Software Engineer. He builds systems, reviews and writes code, tests and analyzes software. His current work is integrating new features into the gridscale API and to improve the release engineering of our internal Linux systems. Ben also enjoys contributing to open source projects, giving talks, and writing blog posts about his work.
He has always worked on infrastructure software both at but also before gridscale. In the past he also built data pipelines, wrote C++ code for various different applications, and built hardened Linux systems.

He writes, reads, thinks - everything else derives from it. Michael has 20 years of experience in external and internal corporate communications: text, video, animation, podcast, keynote speeches, workshops, creative concepts. His passion is good and effective language. He divides his life into many equally important halves: freelance consultant, author, copywriter, nerd, editor. Supports gridscale in communication and everything that is written.