Christian studied computer science and business administration at Hamburg University. From 2000, he was a research assistant in the Distributed Systems and Information Systems Group (VSIS), where he played a major role in several research projects on service systems engineering and received his PhD in computer science. In 2006, he was awarded a Marie Currie Fellowship to run his project on "Pattern-Based Architectures for Service Interaction" (PARIS) in the Software Systems Engineering Group (SSE) at University College London. In 2008, he joined University of Karlsruhe as a senior research associate in the eOrganisation group of the AIFB institute.

Since 2000, Christian published more than 30 papers and articles. He is a member of various programme and organization committees and acts as a reviewer for a range of major journals.