Michael
Skutan.
I manage complex enterprise environments and the engineering teams that keep them running. My focus is straightforward: delivering rock-solid infrastructure architecture and identifying where emerging technologies, provide real operational value.
· On-Prem · Hybrid · AI
Keeping systems alive.
And building what's next.
I run enterprise IT infrastructure — handling servers, networks, security, teams, and processes. Over 15 years, I’ve led complex migrations, built frameworks from scratch, and held the line at 3am when things went haywire. I know how corporate systems work, and more importantly, how to keep them stable.
Outside the office, I run a dedicated home lab to test local LLM architectures, containerized setups, and automation workflows. I don't follow tech-bro marketing hype. I build these pipelines to separate actual technology value from noise, firmly believing that IT has exactly one mission: enabling corporate growth through solid, secure-by-design systems that just work.
Technical Competency
Tools & Domains
- ITIL Foundation
CTOM - Customer Technical Operations Manager
Full technical accountability and primary point of contact for mid-to-enterprise and global accounts across diverse verticals. Served in multi-faceted capacities including Consultant, IT Director, and CIO, providing strategic advisory up to Board-level (C-suite).
- Strategic liaison bridging clients, partners, and internal business units
- Lateral leadership of account-specific engineering teams (~15-30 Tier 1/2/3 engineers)
- Ensuring operational excellence and business continuity for daily IT operations
- Continuous optimization and enhancement of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and QoS
- Driving strategic account growth and technological evolution
- Active member of internal and external steering committees
- Scoping, estimation, and finalization of complex technical customer requirements
- Process design, architecture engineering, and continuous improvement (KPI-driven)
- End-to-end accountability for comprehensive technical client documentation
- Incident & Change Management (permanent member of SAB, ISIRT, and CAB)
- Enterprise-tier escalation management and conflict resolution
- Holistic patch management strategies (both scheduled compliance and emergency responses)
- Lifecycle management and technological decommissioning strategies
- Audit compliance, governance responsibility, and regulatory framework guidance
- Oversight, execution, and documentation of disaster recovery (DR) testing and playbooks
// 15+ YRS CORE OPERATIONS // ENTERPRISE GRADE // ARCHITECTURAL RESILIENCE
The following records represent a curated selection of high-impact milestones from over 15 years in enterprise IT infrastructure. They highlight critical turnarounds, complex architectural migrations, and strategic transformations that define my framework for operational excellence.
Enforcing Nationwide Compliance & Enterprise Audit Readiness
Audited capability gaps within the nationwide CTOM team responsible for enterprise outsourcing accounts. Partnered with the CISO office to enforce a mandatory, high-impact workshop campaign, instantly scaling countrywide units to absolute audit-readiness (NIS2, DORA, TISAX, GDPR, ...). Institutionalized the recorded sessions as a permanent onboarding module to secure long-term, repeatable compliance for all future talent acquisitions.
Identity & Access Automation
Spearheaded the end-to-end governance and technical delivery of an automated enterprise delegation framework across Intranet, Camunda, Ansible, and Active Directory. Aligned cross-functional corporate stakeholders, mitigated compliance risks through rigorous internal security audits, and guaranteed high-availability infrastructure upgrades — executed under strict budget responsibility and proven ROI metrics.
Enterprise Delegation Concept
Conceptualized and architected a comprehensive enterprise access model across all Managed Service and Outsourcing business units, strictly aligned with the Microsoft Tier-Model, AGDLP, and Least Privilege principles. Orchestrated strategic, executive-level stakeholder alignment and client workshops to translate complex governance requirements into scalable on-prem and cloud release architectures.
Enterprise Network Redesign
Directed the high-stakes "Go-Live! 2.0" structural network overhaul and data highway reconstruction for a prominent R&D enterprise as acting CTOM and Technical Project Manager. Successfully restructured the entire corporate IT/OT infrastructure to comply with parent-company IP [LAN+WAN] frameworks, achieving optimal resource and crisis management under intense delivery pressure during holiday season.
Carve-Out Public Sector Infrastructure
Led the 1.5-year infrastructure carve-out of a public institution, driving a +50% increase in project contribution margin. As CTOM and Release Engineer, I maintained absolute operational sovereignty until the final cutover, successfully safeguarding systemic integrity by strictly restricting core domain access and administrative privileges from the incoming outsourcing provider.
CTOM Core Team Founding & Lead
Founded and orchestrated a strategic virtual core team of Senior CTOMs to address organizational inertia. Proactively modernized obsolete role frameworks to reflect years of technical and organizational evolution, successfully aligning cross-functional senior leadership. Championed the new operational standards in high-stakes alignment matrices directly against corporate Directors, effectively securing board-level buy-in for future departmental structures.
Cross-Platform Infrastructure Integration
Orchestrated the high-complexity deployment and infrastructure alignment of Mac-Clients within a modern Windows-based environment for a public institution as CTOM and TOM. Acted as both the technical decision-maker and lead engineer, conducting deep-level packet analysis via Wireshark and cross-protocol troubleshooting alongside third-party vendors to guarantee seamless global cluster communication.
Phase-Out Enterprise Infrastructure
Strategically orchestrated and micro-planned the high-stakes, rapid phase-out of a complete holding company's infrastructure from a deeply integrated shared network. Acted as CTOM, TOM, and Release Engineer, reverse-engineering undocumented legacy onboarding workflows and complex operational processes on the fly. Completely decoupled the ITSM provider's digital footprint to establish a clean "As-Is" infrastructure baseline, enabling a flawless, zero-downtime cutover into the customer's dedicated live environment over a single weekend.
Corporate M&A Infrastructure Merger
Executed a high-stakes, multi-site infrastructure consolidation for a major construction merger across 20 decentralized locations. As a key Release Member, I managed consecutive weekend cross-forest migrations and file server OS upgrades under intense timelines. Successfully rescued the project from critical delays by untangling deeply corrupted legacy logon scripts on the fly, modernizing them into robust, centralized drive-mapping Group Policies (GPOs).
Carve-Out Banking Sector
Orchestrated the technical execution of a highly critical, 1-year corporate IT divestiture for a prominent Austrian banking institution. Operating as TOM and Key Release Specialist, I co-piloted the massive, high-stakes "Big-Bang" weekend migration across multiple Active Directory domains. Successfully isolated and re-categorized all file access rights across separate corporate entities under intense executive management scrutiny and strict financial regulatory compliance.
// PROOF OF CONCEPT LAB // BARE-METAL SANDBOX // WILLPOWER-DRIVEN
Local AI Edge Integration (Skyrim Mod)
„Do you get to the Cloud District very often? Oh, what am I saying, of course you don't.“ Architecting an autonomous AI edge pipeline utilizing a Linux Docker stack encapsulated within Windows 10 Enterprise IoT LTSC. Orchestrated a custom, local LLM framework to enable dynamic, real-time context generation and low-latency NPC cognitive routing for highly modded environments, proving the viability of offline generative AI integration under intense system loads.
Hybrid GPU Power Lab
Orchestrating a bare-metal dual-vendor hardware consolidation, pooling an Intel ARC 770 LE and an AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT into a unified local inference host. Engineered to maximize localized VRAM availability for large language models via LM Studio, backed by a structural chassis migration for optimized thermal dynamics, high-volume airflow management, and zero driver cross-talk.
This Very Website (AI-Driven Portfolio)
Engineered this portfolio via localized AI orchestration, successfully migrating from volatile cloud tools like Framer and Inception to a secure, local LLM pipeline. After cloud editors repeatedly corrupted layouts, I reverse-engineered the core design into a high-velocity development loop between Pinegrow, local LLMs, and Vercel — shifting 100% of the inference workload onto my AMD RX 9070 XT to eliminate recurring cloud costs under a strict sub-€20 budget framework. And against all odds of visual editor chaos and unclosed tags, the pixels actually behave in public now.
DISCLAIMER:
AI was utilized strictly for boilerplate code generation, layout restructuring, and syntax optimization, while all architectural decisions, security hardening, and final code reviews were executed manually (Human-in-the-loop).
Local LLM Roleplay Engine
Successful deployment and performance-tuning of specialized open-source models (including fine-tunes from the open-source AI community) for highly immersive roleplay engines. Focused on advanced quantization strategies (GGUF/IQ quants) to maximize tokens-per-second and context windows on dedicated VRAM. Extensively tested context window depth, custom system prompts, and memory retention to maintain logical consistency across growing token horizons.
RAG Architectures & Context Stress-Testing
Systematic stress-testing of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) frameworks to evaluate information retrieval limits and context degradation. Flooded various open-source models with massive technical documentation, slide decks, and enterprise data schemas to analyze vector search accuracy. Focused heavily on identifying the "lost in the middle" phenomenon, benchmarking exactly when and why models drop critical context within deep prompt horizons.
Gaming
RPGs, deep strategy, and immersive sims. Yes, including Deus Ex. Dissecting complex game mechanics and optimization loops is where the fun begins. Let's be honest: Min-maxing simulated worlds is not so different from actual architecture work.
Homelab Tinkering
Pushing a single consumer chassis to its thermal limits. Maximizing VRAM by running mismatched GPUs for local open-source AI models, virtualization, and dedicated docker experiments. Abuse of gaming hardware at its finest.
Audio Money Sink
Chasing the perfect, uncompromised sound signature. Collecting and modding planar and dynamic headphones while tuning high-end desktop DAC/AMP stacks. For me, it's a relentless pursuit of a rich, engaging audio presentation and pure resolving power — tailoring every component to deliver the ultimate listening experience.
Let's talk.
Seriously.
Whether it's a job opportunity, enterprise consulting requests, a collaboration on an AI experiment, or just comparing homelab setups — I'm open to interesting conversations.