Hey, i’m Franz Bettag, an AI Security Engineer, entrepreneur, security researcher, and platform architect from the Nuremberg Metropolitan Region.
I have spent 25 years building and securing production systems, from bare metal to autonomous AI agents. Today i run Bettag Systems and own the 2342 Holding. My primary work is AI Security Engineering for LLM, RAG, and agent systems.
The short version
- Security research: #2 VDP Security Researcher Germany, HackerOne Q1/2026
- Kleinanzeigen.de: Lead/Sole Engineer from 2014 to 2019. I rebuilt and operated the FreeBSD platform end to end in Go, before its sale to eBay
- Open source: Liftweb committer since January 2012, and still listed by the project today
- Infrastructure: running my own racks since 2005, now a Boutique Private Cloud for 2342 products and selected project clients
- Entrepreneurship: Founder & Owner of 2342 Holding, with anycast.io as its domain registry, portfolio management, and Anycast DNS company
- Speaking: talks on AI security, agentic engineering, Scala/Lift, and Elixir/BEAM
The sources behind these claims live on my public evidence page.
Infrastructure before cloud was a product
I started with Unix and internet infrastructure in 2001. Over the years that meant Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Solaris and SmartOS, plus macOS on the workstation and app side.
The infrastructure story went from leodom.net to qs-housing.net and then anycast.io. I have operated my own racks since 2005. In the early years that was mostly customer infrastructure. Today it is a private platform for my own products and selected project clients, not public hosting or public housing.
Security was always part of operating the system, not a separate checklist.
Early, usually too early
I have a habit of moving before a technology becomes fashionable.
I worked with Ruby and Ruby on Rails from 2006 through late 2009, which made me one of the early Rails developers in Germany. From 2008 i built Objective-C iPhone apps, also very early in the German market.
Ruby eventually became too slow for the systems i wanted to build, so i moved to Scala in 2009. Scala, Liftweb, Netty, and distributed systems dominated my work until 2013 or 2014. I became a Liftweb committer in January 2012, maintained and adapted a fork of Foursquare’s Rogue MongoDB DSL for Lift projects, and added write support around Slashem.
From 2014 to 2019, Go and FreeBSD became the core of my work on Kleinanzeigen.de. Kubernetes came later through separate platform and cloud projects. It was never part of the Kleinanzeigen stack.
Since 2020 i have worked mainly with Elixir and the BEAM for long-lived systems, Go for CLI tools, and Rust for libraries and small servers. Since 2025 i have also built Swift apps and server-side Swift/Vapor through 2342.
The full chronology is on my technology timeline.
AI systems and offensive security
I started building AI and ML systems in 2020. Since the big LLM shift in 2023, my work has focused on LLMs, RAG, production agents, and the engineering needed to keep them useful and controlled.
In 2025 i combined that work with my earlier offensive-security background. The result is a validation-first, distributed security-research system in which agents can discover and test, while humans retain control over irreversible actions. That work led to real findings and to the #2 German VDP ranking on HackerOne in Q1/2026.
You can read the technical story in How I Accidentally Became #2 VDP Researcher for Germany on HackerOne, or see the talk slides.
Talks
I have spoken at the Claude Code Meetup in Nuremberg, a Claude Community Event at Stadthalle Fürth, MCH2022, Scala LiftOff London, Herbstcampus Nuremberg, Skills Matter, and Lift community events.
The MCH2022 talk covered modern web applications with Elixir, Phoenix, and BEAM without writing JavaScript. My current talks focus on validation loops, agentic engineering, and security research. The canonical list is at bett.ag/en/talks.
Outside work
There is usually a cat on my lap while i am doing all of this. I have a whole page about my animals, including the ones who are no longer here.
I also tried building a German AI channel on YouTube and TikTok in 2023. It did not take off. Being good at the technical work does not automatically make you good at daily creator content, but i would rather leave the attempt visible than rewrite history around only the wins.
If you want to discuss securing a production AI system, get in touch through Bettag Systems.