About me
Hi there! 👋#
I am Hardik Mehta, and I have spent about twenty years building software that other people depend on.
The short version: I started out writing credit and card authorisation systems for a bank in Munich, spent a decade as a consultant and architect for companies like BMW, Daimler, MediaMarkt Saturn and Payback, co-founded a startup and ran it as CTO, and today I work as a GenAI Solution Architect at Thinkproject, where we build the cloud platform that Europe’s construction and architecture teams run on.
The longer version is that I keep ending up in the same situation from different directions. A genuinely hard technical problem, a deadline that will not move, and a room full of people who need to agree on something before anything can get built. That last part turned out to be the job.
Running a company#
In 2020 I co-founded CINE.BOX and served as its CTO. We had roughly three months to put an entire film festival online, and the deadline was the festival itself, so there was no version of this where we shipped late.
We built live streaming, ticketing and festival passes, multiple user roles, geoblocking, copy protection, and audience voting for the Publikumspreis. It ran at real scale: around 61,000 platform accesses, 39,054 film views (more than the physical cinemas could have seated), 12,795 registered users, 11,034 single tickets and 590 festival passes.
Two decisions I am still proud of. First, we treated rights protection as an architecture problem rather than a legal one, and built a closed Ethereum blockchain that issued every viewer a unique ERC-721 token. That gave us tamper-proof identity, genuine one-person-one-vote audience voting, and an individual watermarking scheme that could trace a leaked copy back to its source. Second, we kept it lean. The whole platform came in at roughly 6 percent of the total festival budget.
The work was later recognised as a Leuchtturmprojekt for blockchain in Germany in independent research commissioned by the Saarland Ministry of Economic Affairs. Around 69 percent of the 1,300-plus attendees surveyed rated the digital festival good or very good.
Platforms at scale#
For three and a half years I was Senior Solution Architect at Hilti Entwicklungsgesellschaft, working on the AWS-based IoT cloud platform that connects tools on construction sites back to the people who own them. I helped define the technical roadmap, led the architecture for IoT features, and spent a lot of time in the space between what the business wanted and what the platform could actually support.
A good part of that time went into the unglamorous work: moving logs into cheaper storage tiers, rethinking how often Lambda functions actually needed to run, and cutting a substantial share off our observability and compute spend without anyone losing a feature.
What I have come to believe#
Ship on the date. A platform that arrives after the festival has ended is not a platform. Scope is negotiable, dates usually are not, and being honest about that early is a kindness.
A cloud bill is an architecture document. If it is growing faster than your users are, that is not a procurement problem, it is a design problem, and it is usually fixable in days rather than quarters.
GDPR belongs in the design, not the review. Every compliance disaster I have watched up close started with someone treating data protection as a gate to pass at the end instead of a constraint to build around from the start.
The hard part is almost never the technology. It is getting engineers, product people, external partners and executives to hold the same picture in their heads. I have learned to enjoy that part.
Hobby#
I am happiest with a telescope, a camera, or a cajon in reach. I am deeply interested in astronomy, and I travel and take photographs whenever I get the chance.
Frequently Asked Questions#
What do you do?#
I am a GenAI Solution Architect at Thinkproject, working on cloud and AI platforms for the construction and architecture industry. Before that I spent three and a half years as Senior Solution Architect at Hilti, and before that I was co-founder and CTO of CINE.BOX.
What is your background?#
Over twenty years in software engineering and architecture, across banking, video on demand, automotive, retail, media and construction technology. I hold a Master of Science in Nuclear Applications from FH Aachen and a Bachelor of Engineering in Electrical Engineering from Gujarat University, which is a longer story than it looks.
Where are you based?#
The greater Munich area in Bavaria, near Landsberg am Lech. I work with clients across Munich, Augsburg and the surrounding region, and remotely across Europe.
What technologies do you work with?#
AWS above all, along with GCP, Kubernetes, Terraform, Java, Kotlin, Python and Go. On the AI side, retrieval-augmented generation, agentic systems, MCP servers, LangChain and LangGraph, Vertex AI and Bedrock.
Which languages do you work in?#
German and English, both fluently. Hindi and Gujarati are my mother tongues.
Do you take on consulting work?#
Yes, on a selective basis. My focus is AWS cost optimisation, security reviews, and EU data protection posture for B2B SaaS and industrial companies. You can reach me at [email protected].