About Me

Hi, I'm Stefan and I live with my family in beautiful central Switzerland.

Since September 2026 I run my own company, Nitako GmbH, as founder and data platform architect. I build data pipelines and lakehouse platforms, design pragmatic cloud setups on Azure, Cloudflare and Hetzner, train teams on Databricks and data engineering, and review architectures. My rule of thumb: build systems that teams can understand and run without me.

I took a detour to get here. I trained as a machine mechanic, then spent fifteen years with the Zug cantonal police, the last eight of them in digital forensics – which is where I started working with data in 2010. After that came consulting: Trivadis, Accenture, b.telligent and ALTYCA.

Alongside that, I teach at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU) and lead two CAS programmes there: CAS Business Intelligence & Analytics and CAS Data Engineering & Applied Data Science.

Along the way I've collected a fair number of certifications. I stopped counting when the badges started needing their own data platform.

When I'm not in front of a screen, I spend as much time as I can with my family, in the mountains or travelling.

On this blog I write about what I build and what I run into along the way – data engineering, Databricks, cloud infrastructure – and I share material for my students. If you'd like to work together, you'll find me at nitako.ch.