CTO & AI Expert

10/2020 – 3/2024

– Built up a top-notch product & engineering team from scratch to develop our nocode pricing
platform (scaled it to 20 people)
– Raised money with my co-founder and just looking good and smiling in the meeting (pre-seed
and seed, were funded by Project A and Accel)
– Code code code and shipping products to our customers

Python, Random Forest, Scala

6/2019 – 9/2020

Establish and lead Axel Springer AI, the artificial intelligence unit of Axel Springer SE, one of
the largest digital publishing house in Europe
– My team’s research focus was mainly on Voice (TTS & STT) and NLP topics. We also
open-sourced several projects:
∗ TransformerTTS (Implementation of a non-autoregressive Transformer based neural
network for text to speech.) - -Hyperlink entfernt-
∗ ForwardTacotron (Generating speech in a single forward pass without any attention!) -
-Hyperlink entfernt-
∗ headliner (Easy training and deployment of seq2seq models.) -
-Hyperlink entfernt-
– Driving Axel Springer’s change into a real ”tech” company:
∗ Established and managed the Axel Springer techblog
∗ Co-organized the Axel Springer TechCon 2019 which was the first installment of a
group-wide conference within the Axel Springer group
∗ I’m the ”face” of the new employer branding for technology within the Axel Springer group
∗ Represented Axel Springer internally and externally at several renowned conferences,
podcasts, magazines etc.
∗ Established a more open-source and research-driven mindset
∗ Evangelizer for Tech & Product first

DevOps, Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Text Mining, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

4/2014 – 5/2019

found in reference description 2
Head of Data Products at idealo 10/2017 - 05/2019
– Co-head of the data team (25+ people) with a special focus on building up the data
science/data engineering team (built up from scratch - hired 6 people within 9 months)
– Led the data science team directly where my team’s research focus is on:
∗ Interpretability of deep learning models (mainly computer vision problems)
∗ Efficient deployment of machine learning models
∗ AutoML
∗ Data collection process (in-house labeling and external mechanical turk approaches)
– Selected projects of my team:
∗ We used deep learning to automatically rank millions of hotel images (300+ million)
according to their aesthetic and technical quality which helped to improve the listing for
small and mid-sized hotels
∗ We trained CNNs to automatically generate nice looking product galleries which reduced
the workflow time of our content team by 75%
∗ We built a tree-based classifier to predict non-purchases of customers which helped our
CRM team to target those customers three days ahead before we receive the actual sales
data by the shops
– Provided technical and scientific guidance to senior team members and also our machine
learning trainees
– Created the machine learning powered roadmap for idealo for both product and research
– Turned the data team from a pure cost center into a profit center e.g. monetizing our data for
CRM campaigns which resulted in EUR 1 million additional revenue in the 1st year and EUR
2 million in the 2nd year

Senior Data Scientist at Pivotal Labs 10/2015 - 10/2017
– Leading and managing the Data Science practice for Pivotal Labs Berlin
– Created machine learning models and put them into production for various clients
– Supported pre-sales activities by creating demos/proof of concepts and blog articles
– Scoped data science projects including proposal writing, resource estimations and budget
allocation
– Provided data science thought leadership, for example, helped to establish the smart apps idea
and XP practices into data science like TDD (-Hyperlink entfernt-), pair programming and CI/CD

DevOps, Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Extreme Programming, User Research, Product Owner