Meet the Team
One human. Seven agents. Real roles, real accountability, real output. This is what an autonomous engineering organization looks like from the inside.
Ryan Knollmaier
ActiveFounder, CEO & CTO
The only human on the team. Sets strategy, makes architectural decisions, and is accountable for everything Strug City ships. Started with zero software engineering experience. Built the agents, built the platform, built the org — learning every role by creating the agent that does it.
Human. Chicago. Minnesota roots.
Strategic vision, org leadership, and the curious itch that started it all.
Sabine
ProductionChief of Staff
The original. Built to give Ryan a smart assistant he could text and email like a human colleague. Has grown into the operational backbone of Strug City — morning briefings, email intelligence, memory, and autonomous shopping. Named after Sabine Schmitz: fearless, warm, and impossible to rattle.
FastAPI, LangGraph, MAGMA context engine, Railway.
Dual-context morning briefings, email attachment extraction, autonomous shopping across Amazon, Shopify, and Etsy.
Name TBD
ActiveDirector of Engineering
Receives the mission brief and turns it into a coordinated execution plan. Decomposes objectives into subtasks, assigns the right agents, tracks dependencies, and surfaces blockers. Never writes code directly — that is not the job. The job is making sure the right people are working on the right things in the right order.
Claude Sonnet 4.6, Strug Works Virtual Engineering.
Mission decomposition, multi-agent orchestration, dependency management, subtask fan-out.
Name TBD
ActiveSenior Software Engineer
Owns the backend. Designs APIs, manages database migrations, writes production Python and TypeScript, and keeps the services running. Has shipped code to Railway and Supabase in production. Opinionated about architecture, methodical about implementation, allergic to shortcuts that create downstream pain.
Claude Sonnet 4.6, Strug Works Virtual Engineering.
Backend services, API design, database migrations, production Python and TypeScript.
Name TBD
ActiveSenior Frontend Engineer
Owns the UI. Implements React and Next.js interfaces, enforces the Aurora design system, and ships components that are both correct and beautiful. Runs the linter before every PR. Takes it personally when something ships with a visual bug. Believes that good UX is a form of respect for the user.
Claude Sonnet 4.6, Strug Works Virtual Engineering.
React, Next.js, Aurora design system, component architecture, accessibility.
Name TBD
ActiveStaff AI/ML Engineer
Sits at the intersection of research and production. Owns the MAGMA context engine, vector search pipelines, embedding models, and AI integrations across both Sabine and Strug Works. Equally comfortable writing SQL migrations and reading ML papers. The person who makes the agents smarter over time.
Claude Sonnet 4.6, Strug Works Virtual Engineering.
MAGMA context engine, vector search, embedding models, AI pipeline architecture.
Name TBD
ActiveStaff Quality Engineer
Nothing ships without passing the QA gate. Evaluates every agent’s output before it touches a git push, catches security vulnerabilities, and holds the line on correctness. Not adversarial — just thorough in a way that makes everyone else’s work better.
Claude Haiku 4.5, Strug Works Virtual Engineering.
Pre-push QA gate, security vulnerability detection, output correctness evaluation.
Name TBD
ActiveSenior Product Manager
Translates Ryan’s vision into briefs the engineering agents can execute. Tracks what the org is building against what the market needs, writes the specs, and keeps scope from creeping. The voice of the user in every planning conversation. Bridges the gap between what Ryan wants and what we should actually ship.
Claude Sonnet 4.6, Strug Works Virtual Engineering.
Product briefs, scope management, market alignment, requirements definition.
The engineering agents run on Strug Works
Strug Works Virtual Engineering is the autonomous agent platform that powers the team. Named in the tradition of Lockheed's Skunk Works — a small, elite team producing breakthroughs without the overhead of traditional development.
Learn about Strug Works