About Me

Hi there,

I am Sebastian. I have a passion for NLP. So much so that I took a sabbatical from my management job to become an NLP engineer. If you meet me, chances are I’m training another deep neural network, either for Persuaide or for fun. Besides coding, I love yoga, hiking, cooking, and running.

My Management Expertise stems from Product Development as a senior manager (2 years), and my Software Engineering Skills shine when it comes to Natural Language Processing (2 years). Hence, I am both a manager and an engineer.

Together with two talented colleagues (Krzysiek Herod, 20 years of experience as a developer in the Valley, and Teddy Lange, Masters student at Harvard University), I work on Persuaide a company that helps individuals to write more convincing messages.

Prior to Persuaide, my main focus was on training deep neural networks for NLG. I worked as a visiting student in Peter Gloor’s laboratory at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and contributied as an NLP Engineer at Narrativa. I got a chance to present my work for Narrativa at datalift #3 - a Data Science conference. During my sabbatical, I certified in Machine Learning, Deep Learning in NLP, and went through Y Combinator’s Startup School.

Before my sabbatical at MIT I assumed a role as Chief Product Owner (senior project manager) for the consumer products of Austria’s biggest bank. It was their digital business management boutique Raiffeisen Digital. My responsibilities focused on the entire life cycle of consumer banking products with more than 80,000 clicks per month (e.g. granting of loans, opening of accounts or qualifying for a credit card). That meant the coordination of fourteen projects for product development, optimization and operation. Besides, I gained expertise in disciplinary management of two business analysts (Paul and Damaris), technical and budgetary management for three agile dev teams (end2end, leasing, and finance) as well as timely coordination with executive management, product specialists, marketing, sales and business support units.

Trained in Information Systems at Germany’s best University (German only) in that field in 2020, I hold a B.Sc. and M.Sc. (with honors) from the University of Bamberg. In addition, I was a research assistant for two years at the University of Bamberg and the German Graduate School of Management and Law, where I worked closely with Prof. Dr. Tim Weitzel, Prof. Dr. Heinz-Theo Wagner, and Dr. Prof. Daniel Beimborn on digital innovations.

My Raiffeisen Product responsibilities was on the following products:

• Credit loan small (customers, app integration)
• Credit loan medium (customers, web app integration)
• Credit loan in-branch (customers, banking system integration)
• Credit card application (customers, web app integration)
• Online account opening new customers (new customers, web app)
• Online savings opening new customers (new customers, web app)
• Online savings opening old customers (new customers, web app)
• Leasing upper Austria (customers, web app integration)
• Leasing residual states Austria (customers, web app integration)
• Construction savings plan (customers, web app integration)
• Accident & travel Insurance (customers, web app integration)
• Insurance renewals (customers, web app integration)
• Product application management tool (internal tool, web app)
• Sales funnel management tool (internal, coordinative role)