I build the platforms AI agents run on, the walls that keep them contained, and a safety copilot for the plane I fly.
AI Platform & Runtime Compute lead at a global bank. Co-author of Kubernetes Recipes. Inventor, educator, student pilot.
The bottleneck is no longer writing code. It is saying, precisely and once, what we want, in a form that many minds can execute in parallel without stepping on each other.
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I'm Grzegorz Stencel, Greg to almost everyone, an engineer in Bournemouth, UK. I've spent nearly two decades on the layer other engineers stand on: Linux, networks, containers and Kubernetes. Today I lead AI Platform & Runtime Compute at a global bank, where AI agents and untrusted code have to run safely on shared infrastructure.
Outside the day job I build in public: an open-source conductor for coding agents, a fleet orchestrator, an offline safety copilot for the aircraft I'm learning to fly, courses that draw the machine before they explain it, and hardware I solder myself.
I write about all of it under one idea, software as a thought: when code gets cheap, clear intent becomes the scarce thing.
A book, field guides, essays and explainers. Each piece on pages.stencel.ai is a single HTML file you can open on a plane; the tech notes go back to 2014.
Apress, 2025
A Practical Guide for Container Orchestration and Deployment
A problem-and-solution guide to running Kubernetes for real: installation and the API, stateless and stateful workloads, scaling, storage, networking, observability, control-plane administration and security.
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Four Claude tiers, a 50× price spread and a live cost simulator. Route cheap first, verify the output, and escalate only what fails.
Field guide, August 2026
Why two different models can't simply swap memories, and the 2024–2026 research teaching them to: a diagram-first tour of KV-cache sharing.
Visual explainer, July 2026
Bots now make most web requests. What that means for the stack we all learned, and the five new layers growing on old plumbing: intent, identity, delegation, payment and discovery.
Essay, July 2026
Compiled coordination for the age of many minds: eight tenets for building one thing with a fleet of agents, without collisions.
Manifesto, 2026
How Kimi K2's Agent Swarm trains orchestration into the model, and where it is still thin.
A working obituary, built as the single HTML file that replaces them both.
An engineering drawing of microVM trust tiers, eBPF egress control and kill switches for AI coding agents.
An animated walk-through you can play, pause and step.
The same treatment for a contactless payment.
The product tour, with a live terminal demo and the full feature map.
How a spoken idea becomes planned, parallel, tested and deployed work.
Logged since 2007, newest first: networks and security, then Python and DevOps, then Kubernetes platforms, and now AI infrastructure.
| Years | Organisation | Role | Remarks |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023–now | JPMorgan Chase | Vice President, AI Platform & Runtime Compute | Head of Runtime Compute from 2023, leading a 13-engineer team that drove adoption of public-cloud runtime compute. Then moved to the private cloud to lead AI adoption on the Kubernetes platform, including the layers that let AI agents run safely at scale. |
| 2019–2023 | JPMorgan Chase | Tech Lead, Public Cloud Enablement | Built a Python platform team for public-cloud adoption, and an on-premises platform that spins up secure, fully working environments with an in-browser IDE in seconds, for hands-on training and assessment. |
| 2017–2019 | Anthesis Group | Software Development & DevOps Lead | Containerised the application estate, introduced CI, and moved the company's infrastructure to the cloud on Kubernetes. Mentored engineers in coding and DevOps practice. |
| 2014–2017 | Oxford University Press | Python & DevOps Engineer (contract) | Upgraded the Django-based publishing framework and introduced Docker-based CI with Bamboo, Bitbucket and Gitflow. |
| 2007–2014 | MADE.COM, ING Group, Ericsson | Python development, security architecture, network engineering | At MADE.COM, moved environments to Vagrant, then Docker with Jenkins CI. At ING, as Security Software Architect and Security Incident Manager, built automation linking LDAP, Outlook and ITSM tools that cut incident handling from minutes to seconds. At Ericsson, IP services and operations tooling. |
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Totals 19 years since March 2007
Certified CKAD, CCNA, Certified ScrumMaster, ITIL v3
Education BSc Computer Science, 2003–2006
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Where the work leaves the screen: the bench, the cockpit, the expo floor and, now and then, the water.
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Real nodes on a budget: i7 laptop boards wired into a working cluster.
3D-printed and soldered, then given a Jetson Nano, person detection and servos driven over a web API.
Apple's GPU memory cap, how to raise it, and what that means for 70B models.
An app that runs a fixed CPU and GPU load and logs the battery controller, to compare replacement batteries head to head.
Student pilot on the Piper PA-28 out of Bournemouth, working toward a private pilot licence.
Crewed a Clipper 68 alongside professional sailors, racing around the Isle of Wight.
A Mac Studio with 128 GB, a MacBook Pro M3 Max and an RTX 4090 workstation, running a multi-agent fleet as my daily environment.
Three ways in. Each button opens an email with the right subject line, so it reaches me ready to answer.
I take ideas from first principles to working systems. apex went from a manifesto to 365 passing tests with zero dependencies, and AvGuard's camera rig is already flying.
The best of these projects need someone else's runway, classroom or production floor.
Bring me the problem where the defaults stop working.
Based in Bournemouth, UK.
Software as a thought.
© 2026 Grzegorz Stencel. Views are my own. The projects on this page are independent personal work, not affiliated with or endorsed by my employer. One HTML file: no trackers, no cookies.