René Wirnata

PhD Theoretical Physics

2016 - 2021

Technical University Freiberg, Germany

In my PhD years, I worked on combining electrodynamics in media with quantum field theory to obtain a microscopic description of matter based on fundamental microscopic field theories. Eventually, I was able to provide a proof-of-concept for the "Functional Approach" for the free electron gas.

Besides writing thousands of lines scientific code to support my research, I also tought numerous courses (from simple quantum theory to advanced density functional theory) and was heavily involved in university administration and project planning.

PhD Thesis (4.1 MB pdf)   •   Presentation (html)

M. Sc. Applied Natural Science

2014 - 2016

Technical University Freiberg, Germany

While keeping theoretical solid-state physics as subject, I added high-performance computing and code parallelization to my focus areas. By then it was only reasonable to completely take over the institute's IT administration including our self-hosted HPC clusters.

As valedictorian, I was awarded the "Georgius-Agricola Medal" for outstanding performance 🎖️.

B. Sc. Applied Natural Science

2010 - 2014

Technical University Freiberg, Germany

During my Bachelor studies, I already decided to strive for theoretical and computational solid-state physics as main subject while taking additional courses in other fields to gain a broad mathematical and scientific training.
On top, I gradually took over some of the institute's IT administration and started giving tutor lessons.

🔥 Open for job offers!

> Jan 2025

System Engineer  -&-  DevOps Consultant

2021 - 2024

Scandio GmbH, Munich/Berlin, Germany

• Leading German semiconductor manufacturer
  Migrated and operated a 50k user Confluence instance to Openshift Kubernetes incl. CI/CD and observability stack. Lead a team of 4 Devs.
• Prominent European home appliances manufacturer
  Operated and developed the Kubernetes-based Internal Developer Platform for 300+ tenants (~3M end users).
• Major player in the automotive sector
  Operated and developed the entire Atlassian-based agile toolchain (130k+ users). Spearheaded Datadog as enterprise observability platform.
• Scandio in-house
  Trained juniors and new teams in DevOps/GitOps methodology and agile workflows. Built up and organized the Scandio Berlin office. Participated in sales pitches. Gave tech talks at meetups.

Researcher  -&-  HPCC Operator

2016 - 2021

Technical University Freiberg, Germany

• High-Performance Computing
  Built a new HPC Cluster from scratch, including hardware installation in a Lampertz IT security room, automated provisioning of compute nodes, job queueing system, user management and storage.
• Scientific Software Development
  Created various Shell and Python scripts and UI tools to transform, analyze and visualize numerical data. Enhanced C, Fortran and Python code bases to run massively parallel on hybrid systems using MPI, openMP and CUDA.