I currently live in a small village north of Berlin with my family and several chickens.
Email: kaspar@vongruenberg.com and my LinkedIn.
Professional interests
I work on advancing Platform Engineering into the operating model for knowledge work in the enterprise, grounded in a software engineering perspective.
I have founded several companies and institutions in this space and rolled out many platforms hands-on.
I write independently about the theory that underpins this work in the form of a book, essays, talks, and a newsletter.
Current focus: how platforms enable enterprise AI adoption, and what an agentic platform has to look like for agents to work safely at scale.
Book
Thinking in Platforms: Platform engineering as the operating model for work in the AI era, written with Luca Galante, is out now.
Latest writing
- What is an Agentic Platform? - Defines the Agentic Platform (AxP) and its three layers: tooling, path specifications, and agent infrastructure.
- The AI platform team - The central team that owns an enterprise's agent infrastructure and runs it as a product.
- What is an AI software factory? - An Agentic Engineering Platform operated at high agent autonomy, and what has to be true for it to run.
- Agents are ephemeral, the mental model doesn't help - Why planning productive agent use in the enterprise needs a different mental model: agent paths.
Private interests
Europe, Ski Aggu, and collective behavior and opinion dynamics in large populations.
Biases
I try to keep commercial interests and my theoretical work clearly separated. Check my bias statement.
Talks and interviews
- Platform Engineering book club: Thinking in Platforms - a conversation and Q&A on the book, with Luca Galante.
- Thinking in platforms: Thrive in the agentic era, PlatformCon 2026 - talk with Luca Galante introducing the platform reference architecture for the agentic era.
- Introducing Agentic Development Platforms - webinar on what the platform is once agents become its users, and how it differs from an Internal Developer Platform.
- Ganesh Datta, Braintrust by Cortex - on why software production must move beyond artisanal execution.
- Kelsey Hightower, PlatformCon - on the origins, lessons, and future of platform engineering.
- Ivan Krnić, 0800-DEVOPS - on platform engineering as controlled, value-creating systems design.