About Me

Hi there,

I am Sebastian. I have a passion for NLP. So much so that I took a break from my management job and took a sabbatical year 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, I love yoga, hiking, cooking, and running in my free time. My friends describe me as a social butterfly.

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, and Teddy Lange, Masters student at Harvard University), I work on Persuaide a product that helps individuals 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 the role as Chief Product Owner for the banking product streams at Austria’s biggest bank. It is their online management boutique named Raiffeisen Digital. I was responsible for the entire life cycle of a set of 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 product specialist, marketing, sales and 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) in Business Informatics from the University of Bamberg. In addition, I was a research assistant for three years at the University of Bamberg and the German Graduate School of Management and Law, where I worked closely with Prof. Dr. Tim Weitzel, on digital innovations.