About me

I am a Machine Learning Engineer at Booking.com in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. My team is part of the Machine Learning Platform track, which aims to provide a central platform enabling machine learning practitioners across the business. My team is mainly responsible for supporting “pre-production” machine learning activities, including rapid prototyping, scalable model training and evaluation, and productionization activities. Our ML environments are one of the primary entrypoints for ML practitioners into Booking’s burgeoning cloud ecosystem.

I have a background in theoretical physics and most of my previous professional experience is in applied ML. However, these days I mostly think about how to streamline processes for productionizing ML, how to design beautiful APIs (mostly in Python), how to improve speed and robustness of data and CI/CD pipelines, and generally how to make it nice to do ML at Booking.

Outside of work, I love board/card games (especially strategic ones) and bad jokes (check out the collection that I maintain with my sister), and books (find me on Goodreads). Besides that, I have more phases than hobbies, which have recently included cooking, bouldering, and having kids (hence the lack of recent blog posts).

Born in the UK, I lived as a child in Scotland, England, a German exclave in Switzerland, the USA, and, for my teenage years, in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. I completed my bachelor’s in physics in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and my master’s in theoretical physics in Uppsala, Sweden, writing theses on nuclear fusion energy and string theory. In November 2016 I began working as a Data Scientist and Consultant at KPMG, returning to live in the Netherlands with my wife, Lisette. I joined Catawiki in January 2019, and Booking.com in March 2021.