← Steps

Mike German

I build production multi-agent Claude systems that close deals, run large-scale disaster-recovery analytics, simulate wind turbines on GPUs, and push original research toward peer review — usually all in the same week.

Ph.D., P.E.·Fulbright·Forbes 30 Under 30·U.S. Secretary of State Award for Corporate Excellence

What I do

For the last ~18 months I’ve been the embedded AI engineer across two climate-tech startups at once — Airloom Energy (Breakthrough Energy / Gates-backed wind) and Forge Industries (cement-plant biofuel) — and the operator who also closes the deals. Effectively a Forward Deployed Engineer of two, shipping 30+ Cloud Run services that run BD, customer research, technical analysis, federal grant capture, and document generation as multi-agent Claude pipelines.

I’ve been driving Claude Code as my primary tool every day since it shipped. The work below is real and mostly live: large-scale disaster-recovery reconciliation, GPU CFD/FEA on a novel turbine, an open ocean-physics research program heading for a peer-reviewed journal, and a habit of teaching whole teams — including non-technical ones — to build with Claude themselves. Underneath it is 15 years scaling deep tech, from $3.6B PPAs to nanotech water infrastructure serving 500K people.

1.09M
line items reconciled across disaster-recovery analytics
30+
Cloud Run services in production
$3.6B
top of the PPA book I led at Last Energy
500K
end-users on nanotech water infrastructure

Selected work · built with Claude

Federal & government technology

Federal environmental review at portfolio scale

6 yrs · STEPS Ventures

Before the AI work: evaluated $1.2B+ in federal projects across 8 FEMA regions, 85 declared disasters, and 32 states / territories / tribal regions under 44 CFR Part 206 and the full NEPA / ESA / NHPA / CZMA stack. I know how civilian agencies actually buy and absorb new technology — and where they get stuck.

Wind + 272 DoD installations, mapped for siting

Airloom · defense

Airloom’s federal/state offtaker-intelligence platform: real wind-resource fields crossed with 272 DoD installations, substation proximity, slope, and land-status (BLM / tribal / state) to score buildable sites across five states and Canada — and DIANA TEVV applications for wind-tunnel and cold-weather testing.

Engineering simulation

De-risking a floating wind turbine before steel is cut

Airloom · GPU CFD/FEA

A multi-agent + GPU study of a barge-mounted version of Airloom’s turbine. The simulation found the killer: very high stiffness put the roll period inside the Mediterranean wave band — resonant roll → ±17° wing angle-of-attack swing → dynamic stall → ~82% energy loss and weld fatigue life of ~9 days. Then a custom moving-base 2D CFD solver (JAX-style GPU integrator) showed the fix — lower the metacentric height, detune the roll — and turned a “maybe” into a clear pivot recommendation.

An engineering portal with 11 CFD/FEA simulation films

Airloom · engineering portal

I rebuilt Airloom’s internal engineering-analysis portal: 95 catalogued analyses, a gallery of 11 CFD/FEA simulation films, and a live 3-D wing-polar tool — rendered through a Vertex / Gemini image pipeline. Engineers browse the digital-twin work the way you’d browse a product catalog.

Original research

The Eel Project — toward a Nature-track paper

Steps Ventures · open research

An open research program attacking one of biology’s true mysteries — no European-eel egg has ever been seen in the wild — the way you’d attack a physics problem, with open data, first principles, and simulation. The headline result (a stationary spawning front “warming in place”) is being prepared for a climate/marine journal, with real domain experts now in the loop. Every claim is built to be falsifiable and reported either way — including the hypotheses that died.

Read the project

A differentiable neural digital twin of a larva

JAX · GPU · differentiable

The flagship method: an end-to-end differentiable larval drift model in JAX, where the swimming policy is a neural network trained through a daily eddy-resolving ocean — with a quantum radical-pair magnetocompass in the loop — and calibrated against real arrival data by gradient descent. No published eel study does this. It runs as a GPU job in the cloud, on real ocean fields only.

Teaching teams to build with Claude

A calm onboarding for people who’ve never used a terminal

Non-technical users

I’ve written and run the “learn to build with Claude” path for non-technical colleagues across six different organizations — one-word per-org aliases, siloed logins and memory, and a “magic paste” self-setup prompt — plus a 5-challenge teaching deck. The lesson I keep applying: for non-technical end users, the Desktop app + connectors beats the terminal every time.

Handing real users a system they can run without me

Integra Medical · Drinkwell

For a physician with no technical background, I stood up a website — live on her own domain at integramedicalnyc.com — that she now edits herself with Claude Code (auto-deploys on save). For Drinkwell’s field teams I built a retrieval system over their design corpus and three WhatsApp histories with recency/authority reranking, so the assistant gives the answer their lead engineer would. The goal is always they keep building after I leave the room.

integramedicalnyc.com — live

Open source · the checkable part

Upstream fixes to projects I don’t own

20+ merged · 16 codebases

The most verifiable proof I ship: more than 20 fixes merged into open-source projects I do not own, across 16 codebases from reactor physics (mcdc, pyne) to ocean modeling (Parcels) to bioinformatics (biopython, scikit-bio) — with 60-plus more open. Each was found by a scanner, then reproduced, tested, and read by hand before it went up. Every one carries my name and a real repro.

See the merged PRs on GitHub

The honest version, including the failure rate

How we work

A plain account of running a software operation without writing the code. The part demos skip: even a large model’s maximum-confidence findings were wrong 40 to 50% of the time. The only reliable filter was boring — reproduce it, run the tests, read the surrounding code. That gate, not the model’s confidence, is what put fixes upstream.

Read the write-up

Commercial range

$500M–$3.6B PPAs with Fortune 100 buyers

Last Energy

Led the Netherlands commercial country book for a micro-modular-reactor developer — PPAs under negotiation with data-center operators, utilities, and provincial governments — and authored the nuclear environmental licensing for the UK (ONR) and Poland (PAA). I know how enterprise and government buyers actually move, and where pilots die.

From the operator seat: $20M+ raised, 500K users reached

Drinkwell · Amorphic · Airloom

Co-founded Drinkwell, scaling a nanotech water platform to 500K end-users, 400M+ liters and $15M+ revenue (Forbes 30u30). Raised $5M+ in DOE SBIRs at Amorphic. Won a $925K New Mexico Advanced Energy Award for Airloom’s first commercial demo and structured a $1.6M Nevada tax abatement for Forge. I’ve carried the number, not just the slideware.

How I work

Daily stack: Python, the Claude API, Claude Code, MCP, multi-agent orchestration, evals, Cloud Run / GCP / Azure, Streamlit, Mapbox, and the Google Workspace APIs, all governed through Secret Manager. I write the evals, I debug the prompt regressions, and I’m the one paged when a Cloud Run revision misbehaves at 2 a.m.

I care about the same thing Anthropic’s applied teams seem to: production systems that survive contact with real users and messy data, claims stated at the confidence the evidence supports, and leaving people more capable than I found them. Most of what I read about Forward-Deployed and Applied-AI patterns is what I’m already doing — just without the leverage of Anthropic’s infrastructure or colleagues to compare notes with.

Claude APIClaude CodeMCPMulti-agent orchestrationLLM evalsRAG / rerankingPythonCloud Run / GCPAzureJAX / GPU simStreamlitMapboxVertex / GeminiSecret Manager

Background

Founding AI Engineer & Business Development
STEPS Ventures · Airloom Energy · Forge Industries
2025 – present
Business Development Director (Netherlands) → Environmental Lead
Last Energy · micro-modular nuclear
2023 – 2025
Environmental Consultant · federal NEPA / 44 CFR Part 206
STEPS Ventures
2019 – 2023, 2025
Director, Business Development
Amorphic Tech · desalination energy-recovery hardware
2018 – 2023
Co-founder & Board Member (Head of Engineering 2010–2018)
Drinkwell · nanotech safe-water infrastructure
2010 – present

Education

Lehigh University — M.S. / Ph.D., Environmental Engineering (2012 / 2017)
UMBC — B.S. Chemical Engineering, Honors College, Summa Cum Laude (2009)

Recognition

U.S. Secretary of State Award for Corporate Excellence — Climate Resiliency (2022) · Fulbright Scholar (2014) · Forbes 30 Under 30 (2015) · 3 patents · 15 peer-reviewed manuscripts · 500+ citations

Also shipping · studio work in progress

Beyond the work above, I take products from idea to live and paying. A few that are mid-flight:

See the full studio →

Get in touch

If you’re putting Claude in front of real customers and real missions, I’d love to compare notes.

Mike German, Ph.D., P.E. · mike@stepsventures.com