# Helmut Hoffer von Ankershoffen > Founder & mentor — helmguild. Customer-oriented engineering leader. Twenty-six years at the wheel — across regulated industries, hyperscale platforms, founder-mode startups, and a national-scale search engine before "search" was a category. I learned the craft of steering by doing it: shipping under real weather, holding course while wind, current, and crew tried to push the ship off line. [Helmguild](/) is where I now teach that craft to other engineering leaders, hand-to-hand. Read the [Manifesto](/manifesto/) and the [AMMP RFC](/rfc/ammp/) we wrote with Pepe Arturo to scale that mentoring through the agent layer. ## Career, briefly - **2026 → present** — Manager at **Snowflake** Inc. - **2023 – 2026** — SVP Product & Engineering, **Aignostics**. Digital pathology AI, Charité spin-off. Matured product & engineering org, launched first SaaS offering, compliant with ISO 13485 and 27001. - **2019 – 2023** — Software Development Manager, **Amazon** Inc. Music ML platform & teams; established central content orchestrator serving 20+ personalised experiences, bootstrapped central feature repository for machine-learning and heuristic use cases. - **2010 – 2019** — Founder / CTO mode — WeGreen, **20steps**, Campanda. Sustainability, RAD frameworks, RV marketplace. - **1998 – 2010** — Co-founder, CEO & CTO, **Neofonie**. Bootstrapped to €15M revenue, 100+ engineers, profitable from year one. Customers from Axel Springer to VW. - **1996 – 1998** — Chief architect, **Fireball** — Germany's first search engine. TU Berlin: MSc Computer Science *summa cum laude*, BSc Mathematics. Co-inventor on a relevance-ranking patent later cited by Microsoft, Bing, Yahoo. ## What I mentor on - **Agentic Engineering Management.** Steering engineering organisations whose work is increasingly delegated to AI agents — from the operating model and team shape, through review and oversight at machine pace, to the principles that hold when the artefacts ship faster than humans can read them. - **Innovation and Change Management.** Leading teams and organisations through technology shifts that move faster than the org can absorb them — holding course, sequencing the corrections, keeping the people on the wheel rather than under it. ## Operating principles Eight, in tension with each other on the right days. The same eight that [Snowflake](https://www.snowflake.com/en/company/our-values/) publishes as its company values — they name how I already operate, at life, at work, and in training for Ironman. 1. **Put Customers First.** Listen, then build, then deliver. 2. **Integrity Always.** Say the hard thing. Then commit fully. 3. **Think Big.** Lift heavier than yesterday. 4. **Be Excellent.** Same lap, faster, cleaner. 5. **Make Each Other The Best.** Calibrate, don't compete. 6. **Get It Done.** The mountain doesn't move; you do. 7. **Own It.** Run your own race. 8. **Embrace Each Other's Differences.** Different paces, same trail. ## Off the keyboard Berlin / Woltersdorf. German native, English professional. Married to Sandra. Ironman 70.3 Erkner finisher (2025); training for Ironman European Championship Frankfurt (full distance) — 28 June 2026. Photography on the side. ## Helmut on the web - [helmut.hoffer-von-ankershoffen.me](https://helmut.hoffer-von-ankershoffen.me) - [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/helmut-hoffer-von-ankershoffen/) - [GitHub](https://github.com/helmut-hoffer-von-ankershoffen) - [X](https://x.com/h_ankershoffen) - [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/helmut.hoffer.von.ankershoffen/) - [Strava](https://www.strava.com/athletes/helmut-hoffer-von-ankershoffen) --- Canonical URL: