Sebastian Koch
Performance engineering, and AI safety in medicine and drug manufacturing.
PhD student, TU Berlin · Product Owner, p36
About
I’m a PhD student in computer science at TU Berlin and Product Owner at p36. It won’t be long until most software is written by AI, and some of it will help make medicines or sit next to a surgeon. I work on how we check it.
In my research, in David Bermbach’s 3S group, I build assurance frameworks for evaluating distributed systems, especially for performance engineering. At p36 and in the TRANSFER project I work on ensuring the reliability of cloud and AI systems in highly critical areas: drug manufacturing and the operating room. In my writing I focus on defending against biorisks, which I consider one of the most pivotal tasks of our generation.
We can already build faster than we can verify, and the gap grows every month. My bet is that checking has to become as cheap as building.
Outside of work I volunteer with Effektiv SpendenGermany’s effective-giving platform. I also started beforeyoudonate.org, an open letter signed by Peter Singer and a co-founder of Lovable.
effektiv-spenden.org ↗, to help donations reach the places where they do the most good.
Work
- gxpevalA validation framework for language models in GxP processes, built on Inspect AI. It sorts use cases into risk tiers, stops a test run once the statistics allow a verdict, and keeps an audit trail.
- TRANSFERDecision support for surgeons during an operation. A TU Berlin research project, built together with the surgeons who will use it. I am a research associate on it.
- beforeyoudonate.orgAn open letter asking people to donate more effectively. Peter Singer signed it, and so did a co-founder of Lovable.
Publications
- 2026Continuous Operational Control of PaaS in GxP EnvironmentsRobin Wennemuth, Sebastian Koch, Florian Kekule, Robert McDowallThe approach behind the qualification platform I own at p36: continuous operational control of cloud infrastructure in place of one-time static qualification.
- 2026Duet Instrumentation: An Agentic Approach to Improving Sensitivity in Cloud Service BenchmarkingSebastian Koch, Nils Japke, David BermbachI proposed duet instrumentation, built the system that finds and instruments performance-relevant code changes with an LLM, and ran the experiments.
- 2025Towards an Optimized Benchmarking Platform for CI/CD PipelinesNils Japke, Sebastian Koch, Hendrik Lukaszczyk, David BermbachI worked on the framework design and the CI/CD integration for this vision paper.
- 2024Increasing Efficiency and Result Reliability of Continuous Benchmarking for FaaS ApplicationsTim C. Rese, Nils Japke, Sebastian Koch, Tobias Pfandzelter, David BermbachI contributed to the DuetFaaS evaluation on AWS Lambda and to the paper.
Contact
Write to me about a measurement you can’t trust yet, about effective giving, or, if you study at TU Berlin, about a thesis.
hi@sbstn.io · University mail sk@3s.tu-berlin.de · GitHub · Scholar · LinkedIn