About
Wingston Sharon Wilson
Engineering Manager · Creative Technologist · AI/ML Architect
Amsterdam, Netherlands · creativecodingtech@proton.me · GitHub · LinkedIn
What I Do
I build systems that serve millions of people — and then I go home and live-code music at midnight.
Currently I lead the Flights engineering team at Booking.com, one of the world’s largest travel platforms. Before that I was CTO of a startup in India, a software engineer in Dubai, and a computer science student in Vellore who couldn’t stop writing code even when the assignment was done.
The through-line: I’ve always been more interested in what technology can become than what it already is.
The Journey
VIT University, Vellore, India — Where it started. CS degree, midnight hackathons, first taste of building things that actually ran.
Dubai — First industry years. Learned that production systems are humbling. Learned that good engineering is mostly good thinking, not good typing.
Workshop India (CTO) — Led the technical vision for an education startup. Built teams, made architectural calls, shipped products used by thousands. The crucible.
Amsterdam → Booking.com — Joined as a senior engineer, grew into Engineering Manager for Flights. Now responsible for a platform that handles hundreds of millions of searches annually, leading a team of 12+ engineers across multiple time zones.
Engineering Philosophy
Fifteen years of building production systems has given me strong opinions:
- Distributed systems fail in creative ways — design for it
- The best architecture is the one your team can actually maintain
- AI/ML is most powerful when it’s invisible to the user
- You don’t understand a system until you’ve debugged it at 2am
I’ve built ML pipelines before “LLM” was a household word, designed RAG systems before the acronym existed, and migrated monoliths to microservices more times than I can count.
Creative Technology
This is the part that surprises people.
I started live-coding music with Sonic Pi as a side project. That led to SuperCollider, then MaxMSP, then building audio-reactive visuals in TouchDesigner and Unreal Engine 5.
The project I’m most proud of in this space: Ableton MCP — I built one of the first MCP (Model Context Protocol) integrations for Ableton Live, letting AI assistants directly control music production software. That repo now has hundreds of stars and spawned a whole ecosystem of MCP music tools.
The creative coding thread isn’t separate from the engineering work. It’s where I experiment without constraints, develop taste for system design, and stay curious about what computation feels like.
Open Source
100+ public repositories across tools, experiments, and systems:
- FlowState — Distributed task orchestration with ML-powered scheduling
- LLM-Pokemon-Red — LLM agent playing Pokémon Red autonomously
- Ableton-MCP — Ableton Live ↔ AI assistant via Model Context Protocol
- BriefGPT — Document intelligence and summarization system
- Claude Code Router — Multi-model routing for Claude Code
Beyond Work
Chairman, Taste Before You Waste — Amsterdam-based nonprofit reducing food waste through community redistribution.
Live Coding — I perform at local events on the algorave circuit. Code that makes sound, in real time, in public.
70+ countries visited — The world is a remarkable system. I try to study it directly.
Working Together
I take on selective consulting engagements for AI/ML strategy, engineering leadership, system architecture, and creative technology prototyping.