From vision to value — guided by trust.
CTO at the We.Publish Foundation, co-founder, and open-source maintainer. I build trusted, sovereign platforms for independent journalism and lead engineering teams with a focus on trust, clarity, and shared purpose.
As CTO of the We.Publish Foundation, I lead technology with a focus on trust, transparency, and impact — building scalable open-source platforms that empower independent journalism. With an 8-person engineering team, our CMS has run in production since 2020 and today serves 20+ media outlets across Switzerland and Europe — reaching 5M+ monthly page views at 99.98% typical uptime, and growing fast.
I believe in trust-based, empathetic leadership that lets teams thrive through autonomy, clarity, and shared purpose. Combining deep technical understanding with strategic foresight, I translate complex challenges into sustainable solutions that balance innovation with reliability.
I co-founded two companies outside We.Publish: Seccom, an information-security consultancy (with Michael Scheurer, 2017), and FarmX, bringing modern software to agriculture (2018). My background spans software architecture, infrastructure engineering, and organizational development — I'm passionate about connecting technology and people so that strong engineering meets meaningful purpose.
A strategic stance across everything I lead: understand and control the technology we depend on — as the foundation for strategic independence. In practice: infrastructure we own and operate ourselves, mostly on our own hardware, in Europe, independent of US hyperscalers. That applies to We.Publish's publishing platform, Seccom's consulting and customer systems, and my personal research infrastructure. AI fits the same stance: self-hosted LLMs and legal-AI at Seccom, LLM integration at We.Publish under my technical leadership (transparency-first), AI governance at ETH MTEC, and independent LLM security research. The economics back the architecture: migrating We.Publish from Google Cloud to our own infrastructure cut costs by ~10x.
Open-source publishing platform built at the We.Publish Foundation to give independent media a sovereign, self-hostable digital backbone — a headless CMS with peering, paywall, membership, and newsletter tooling. Built as an alternative to US SaaS publishing stacks, prioritizing control and long-term independence. MIT-licensed, in production at 20+ media outlets across Switzerland and Europe since 2020, with 34 contributors on GitHub — and growing fast.
Self-hosted WireGuard gateway for internal infrastructure. GitHub OAuth login, per-service time-limited access, and a full audit log — a pragmatic zero-trust bastion you can actually run yourself.
Available for talks, panels, podcasts, and written contributions on AI governance in independent media, digital sovereignty for European publishers, build-vs-buy and migrations away from US hyperscalers, LLM security, and open-source platform engineering. To invite, reach out via email.
“A very impressive achievement for a Bachelor’s thesis — I’ve so far only had one Master’s thesis that eventually yielded an RFC, and that took 10 years.”
“He most reminds me of Ryan Stutsman, now Associate Professor at the University of Utah — both demonstrated quite similar skill at picking up research ideas, implementing and documenting them, with the difference that Ryan stayed in academia while Elias kept a foot in industry.”
„In seiner Rolle als Mitglied der Geschäftsleitung zeigt er ein ausgeprägtes Gespür für zukünftige Herausforderungen — sowohl in technologischer als auch in ethischer und gesellschaftlicher Hinsicht.“