About
I work on AI and Engineering for the Dutch Government, currently as Engineer in the Bureau Architectuur & Software Engineering (BASE, in formation). Before this, I was Engineering Manager of the AI Validation Team.
I used to be Machine Learning Engineering Manager in the Search team at Spotify. Before joining Spotify, I spent almost 4 years at DPG Media in various roles, all contributing towards a push for personalisation of news products. Before that, I was a research scientist at Google AI in London and a data scientist at Blendle in Utrecht. I hold a PhD from the University of Amsterdam where I studied self-learning search engines. I interned at Bing/Microsoft Research in Cambridge UK and Yandex in Moscow.
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Professional Appointments
Government
Bureau Architectuur & Software Engineering (BASE, in formation)
The Hague, The Netherlands Engineer (Jan 2025 – present) Engineer in the Bureau Architectuur & Software Engineering (BASE, in formation), working among other things on PoC Machine Law.
Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations (BZK)
The Hague, The Netherlands Engineering Manager - AI Validation Team (Aug 2023 – Dec 2024) Growing and supporting the AI Validation Team at the Digital Society Department, NL Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations (BZK). This is a team of engineers, product, UX, focused on building software for AI validation.
Industry
Spotify
Utrecht, The Netherlands ML Engineering Manager Search (Dec 2021 – Jul 2023) Machine Learning Engineering Manager, primarily supporting the Search Ranking team. The team consisted of Backend, Data, and Machine Learning engineers responsible for building and running the last stage of Spotify’s search platform.
DPG Media
Amsterdam, The Netherlands Head of News Personalisation (May 2020 – Nov 2021) Managed 15 people, divided over 3 teams working on content understanding & search, user understanding, and ranking. Responsible for personalising the news selection across major Dutch and Belgian news titles.
Head of News Data (Oct 2019 – May 2020) Managed two teams focused on news personalisation and newsroom analytics. The teams were responsible for personalisation across major Dutch and Belgian news titles and provided actionable analytics for improving news products.
Team Lead - News Personalisation (Aug 2018 – Sep 2019) Led the News Personalisation Team, a group of engineers and scientists working on personalisation for major Dutch and Belgian news titles.
Machine Learning Engineer (Mar 2018 – Jul 2018)
Google AI
London, United Kingdom Research Scientist (Sep 2017 – Mar 2018) Worked on conversational recommendation systems for the Google Assistant.
Blendle
Utrecht, The Netherlands Data Scientist (Feb 2016 – Aug 2017) Responsible for learning aspects of Blendle’s recommendation engine for journalism.
Academic
PhD Candidate (2011–2016) Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Research Topic: Online Learning to Rank for Information Retrieval. Research on how search engines can learn from users to improve their results. Supervised by prof. dr. Maarten de Rijke and dr. Shimon Whiteson.
Software Engineer (2010–2011) Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Responsible for crawling, processing, and indexing parliamentary proceedings across the European Union as part of the Political Mashup project.
Teaching Assistant (2010) ILLU, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Assisted in the Bachelor level Language Models course, responsible for grading and supervising lab sessions.
Support Staff (2007–2010) Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Responsible for collecting, structuring, and indexing political data.
Internships and Visits
Microsoft Research, Bing
Cambridge, United Kingdom Research Intern (2014) Collaborated on online evaluation of Bing, focusing on bringing interleaved comparisons closer to AB testing. Published a full paper at SIGIR2015.
Yandex
Moscow, Russia Research Intern (2014) Worked on online learning to rank algorithms for freshness ranking with the Yandex research team.
Yahoo! Labs
Barcelona, Spain Visiting Researcher (2012) Worked on integrating a semantic linking project developed at the University of Amsterdam into Yahoo!’s search logs processing.
Education
PhD Information Retrieval
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2011–2016) Thesis: Search Engines that Learn from Their Users. Committee: prof. dr. Maarten de Rijke, dr. Shimon Whiteson, prof. dr. Thorsten Joachims, dr. Evangelos Kanoulas, prof. dr. Diane Kelly, dr. Maarten Marx, and prof. dr. Max Welling.
MSc. Artificial Intelligence
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2008–2010) Distinction: Graduated cum laude Thesis: Tuning Methods in Statistical Machine Translation. Committee: dr. Christof Monz, dr. ir. Leo Dorst, and prof. dr. Khalil Sima’an.
BSc. Artificial Intelligence
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2004–2007) Thesis: Applied Text Analytics for Comments on News-Articles. Thesis was published and cited over 50 times.