Felix Blanco blancofx.work

AI systems that reach production — and stay there.

Engineering leadership first, AI enablement now.

Head of AI Enablement · Y1 Digital AGRhein-Neckar, Germany

Twelve years from BI working student to Head of Development to Head of AI Enablement. Today I run company-wide AI enablement for a digital agency: agents in productive use across every department, autonomous delivery crews that execute specced work, and the cost and usage discipline to keep all of it honest.

Selected work

The question nobody could answer: what does AI actually cost?

Cost & usage observability · cross-provider · 2026

Built the framework that turns AI spend into something you can steer: three vendor sources merged, over 130 identities normalised, and inference cost attributed down to client and project level, split by whether it is billable, absorbed for a client, an internal tool or a personal subscription. Plus an LLM observability rollout on Datadog. Most AI roadmaps are a bet until someone does this. It is also why I own the company-wide AI tooling budget.

Four autonomous delivery crews, in the ticket queue

Multi-agent delivery · JIRA-integrated · cross-model · 2026

Four crews run the full ticket lifecycle in production: refinement, speccing, implementation and QA, across multiple models, inside the same JIRA the humans use. My job is turning business needs into specs precise enough that the crews can execute them end to end. Good specs scale quality; bad specs scale defects, at machine speed.

Schiesser: shop re-platforming, architected

E-commerce re-platforming · Shopify · system architecture · 2024–2026

Led the system architecture of Schiesser's e-commerce re-platforming, delivered in parallel with the Centric PXM PIM implementation. The joint project was presented by Schiesser, Centric Software and Y1 on the K5 Future Retail 2026 stage: product data treated as business strategy, not an IT backend.

YARA: an agent runtime for the whole company

Internal platform · Y1 Digital · 2026

Initiated and own YARA, Y1's internal agent runtime. One place where agents meet the company's knowledge and tools: the backbone for rolling AI capability into every team, not just engineering.

OfficeChefs: co-founded, shipped, run

Parallel venture · Co-Founder & CTO · 2020–2024

Community catering app built as a part-time venture alongside my main role: Flutter app, GraphQL microservices, CI/CD into both app stores. Product development with my own money on the line. Shut down cleanly in 2024 when the market said no: the cheapest product education I ever got, and the perspective I bring to build-vs-buy calls.

An autonomous AI studio, run as a live lab

Multi-agent company · Steam Early Access · 2026

I run a fully agentic studio: engineering, art and marketing agents shipping Death Before Decaf, a commercial roguelite in Steam Early Access, with me as the only human, acting as its decision board. It's where I stress-test agent orchestration, quality gates and cost discipline before they matter at work.

Background

  • 2026 —Head of AI Enablement, Y1 Digital AG · company-wide AI function across engineering, consulting, PM, finance and G&A
  • 2025 —Managing Director, Y1 Operations GmbH · commercial and technical ownership of Y1's AWS hosting business
  • 2022 – 2026Head of Development, Y1 Digital AG · grew the org to 28 engineers with four team leads across six technologies
  • 2020 – 2024Co-Founder & CTO, OfficeChefs UG · parallel venture, part-time
  • 2019 – 2022Software Architect, Atlas IoT Tech GmbH · IoT platform for LoRa data, mobile apps, CI/CD
  • 2017 – 2019M.Sc. Business Informatics, Hochschule Karlsruhe · working student at SAP SE and Planet Sports
  • 2014 – 2017B.A. Business Administration (dual), DHBW Mannheim / Planet Sports · BI, online marketing, PIM tool selection

German & Spanish native · English fluent