Thilo Rau

Founder @ Synohm | Sovereign AI & Open-Source Infrastructure Architecture | Enterprise On-Prem LLMs · High-Performance Clusters · Kubernetes | Fixed-Scope Deployments

Leipzig, Saxony, Germany

About

Most companies leaving VMware trade one dependency for another — a hyperscaler, a licensing model, an AI API that ships their data abroad. Synohm exists for the ones who want out for good. I design and deploy sovereign infrastructure stacks: everything runs on open-source software and hardware you own, in your rack or your datacenter. Not a slide-deck reference architecture — a working platform I've built, hardened, and documented end to end: • Virtualization & storage — Proxmox VE + Ceph, highly available, provisioned as code (OpenTofu + Ansible), rebuildable from a single config file • Identity & trust — self-hosted SSO with enforced MFA (Authentik), your own private certificate authority (step-ca), secrets that never touch a repo • Workloads — CIS-hardened RKE2 Kubernetes with GitOps (Argo CD), backed by your own git remote — no GitHub dependency • On-prem AI — tiered local LLM inference (OpenAI-compatible, so your tools just work) with the governance layer enterprises actually need: deterministic checks gate, models only advise; autonomy is propose-only and explicitly mode-gated; every decision is auditable • Operations — nightly verified backups, central auth-log observability, break-glass paths for every SSO dependency, documentation generated from machine-readable sources of truth so it can't silently drift That last part is the point. Running Ollama on a server is easy. Running local AI inside an auditable, GDPR-clean, EU-AI-Act-ready platform — with the same operational rigor you'd demand from any production system — is what Synohm delivers. Deployments are fixed-scope and fixed-price. You get a defined outcome, full documentation, and a handover your own team can operate.

Experience

  • Founder at Synohm
    May 2026 - Present · 3 mos

    Synohm delivers sovereign infrastructure and on-prem AI platforms as fixed-scope, fixed-price deployments — built entirely on open-source software and customer-owned hardware. The product: a fully documented reference platform, developed in-house covering virtualization (Proxmox VE + Ceph HA cluster), identity and PKI (Authentik SSO + private CA), hardened Kubernetes (RKE2, Cilium, GitOps via Argo CD + self-hosted Forgejo), and a tiered local-LLM inference layer with enterprise governance: propose-only autonomy, deterministic gates with LLM-advisory-only checks, full audit trails. The method: everything as code. Infrastructure declared in OpenTofu, configured by Ansible, documented from machine-readable YAML sources of truth with automated drift detection — the entire platform rebuilds from one configuration file. Typical engagements: • VMware exit: assessment → Proxmox/Ceph target architecture → migration → handover • Sovereign AI enablement: on-prem LLM inference integrated into existing infrastructure, GDPR- and EU-AI-Act-aligned • Platform build-out: identity, PKI, Kubernetes, backup/DR on open source

  • Career transition at Career Break
    May 2025 - Apr 2026 · 1 yr

    Supporting many cultural events, organizing and assisting in Events - Animal Rights Congress Leipzig / GSO Leipzig - Planning, building and setting up a Server Lab Environment based on redundant layered Network Stack with Mikrotik and Proxmox. Research about and use of LLM Models, locally and distributed.

  • noris network AG (Full-time · 4 yrs)
    • Senior IT Systems Engineer (Enterprise Virtualisation) Project Delivery
      Jan 2023 - Apr 2025 · 2 yrs 4 mos

      Rollout of Key Projects, VMware SME, RCA - Mission Critical Production Systems, Impact Mitigation of unresolved issues SSH, Ansible, Confluence, Python, Project Management

    • IT Systems Engineer (Enterprise Virtualisation) Operations IaaS
      May 2021 - Jan 2023 · 1 yr 9 mos

      daily ops, change requests, incident handling, project involvements, VMware SME CMS, RDP, SSH, GIT, Ansible, ITSM

  • VMware (2 yrs 2 mos)
    • Technical Support Engineer II - vSphere Infrastructure
      Jul 2020 - Feb 2021 · 8 mos

      • ESXi/vSphere storage and network support log/dump analysis, storage/network analysis, HCL checks, WCP

    • Technical Support Engineer II - vSphere System Management
      Jan 2019 - Jul 2020 · 1 yr 7 mos

      • troubleshooting vSphere 5.5 - 7.0 log analysis, vSphere AD and SSO integration, vSphere Certificates, Postgres/SQL, shell scripting

  • Apple (4 yrs 11 mos)
    • Network Operations Center Analyst
      Dec 2016 - Jan 2019 · 2 yrs 2 mos

      • monitoring and maintenance of systems and business performance • leading daily performance conference calls with international teams • managing access and interaction routing profiles Avaya Telephony, Genesys CME, Tableau, CRM, IAM, shell scripting, incident management

    • Senior Technical Support Advisor
      Apr 2015 - Dec 2016 · 1 yr 9 mos

      • second level support for all Apple products, consumers and small businesses log analysis, network/storage troubleshooting, user account management

    • Technical Support Advisor
      Mar 2014 - Apr 2015 · 1 yr 2 mos

      • first level support for all Apple consumer products