Hello. I'm Sjoerd.
Everywhere else on this site you've seen me from behind: walking through the film, standing at the foot of the terraces. This page is where I turn around.
Forward deployed AI engineer. Dutch by birth, Londoner by choice for thirteen years, 43 years old. The systems are in the case studies; this is the person who holds their strings.
Almere, age 3
A city built like a good system
My first memory is walking into a new house. We moved to Almere when I was three; the city itself was barely older. It was drawn from scratch in the early eighties: separate paths for cars, bikes, buses, and feet, heating piped into every home, no gas, nothing improvised. I grew up inside a place that had been designed, and I think I've been assuming ever since that the world can be organised kindly.
Across the water from our house was a tennis club, so I played from childhood. Never to beat anyone; for the company. When competition turned the game into pressure in my teens, I walked away rather than make a fight out of something I loved.
London, the five-star years
The night shifts where it started
I came to London with a hotel management degree and worked my way to The London EDITION, a five-star hotel in the Marriott family. As night manager I watched the same manual rituals repeat every night, so I quietly started fixing them. The nightly information sheet began building itself. Paper phone notes became one shared sheet where anything unactioned turned red after a few minutes, and forgotten orders became nearly impossible.
I put Slack on the front desk before messaging was a thing in hotels, so no receptionist had to phone the back office in front of a waiting guest again. Then guests could simply text us. When Marriott needed a five-star pilot for its new guest experience platform, they chose our hotel because of those systems, and me to make it work to a five-star standard.
Nobody asked for any of it. I saw the bottleneck and built the fix. There was never a pivot; the hobby and the career simply merged.
The turn
"If I'm doing something two or three times, I'll spend the time building the automation instead."
I stepped out of hotels and into a hospitality feedback analytics company, and found Monday mornings buried under reports rebuilt by hand. So the reports learned to build themselves, then to fetch their own data, and the role I was hired for turned into one I invented: reporting, then data engineering, then the AI systems. In 2025 I completed a Level 7 AI Data Specialist apprenticeship alongside the day job, and the learning has never stopped since.
I did customer-facing work for a decade before I wrote a line of Python. Most engineers try to bolt on communication; I bolted on the engineering. The rest of that story is told properly elsewhere: ten systems on a shelf and a method for right-sizing AI.
Most days, before noon
Started by walking every kilometre
I picked running back up in Covid, overweight and stopping to walk every kilometre. Two years later, in May 2022, I ran an official half marathon. Not to race anyone: to prove to myself that I could, and I did. These days it's five to eight kilometres almost daily, then proper weights. I'm the fittest I've ever been, and the run is where my mind untangles the day's problems on its own.
At 38 I walked back onto a tennis court after twenty years away and found a community that's now full of friends. I play team competition, but doubles only, because the point is the people.
I am not a fighter. I am a lover.
Twenty-some cats in three years
Every animal is somebody
I foster cats: between twenty and thirty so far, from kittens a few weeks old to a fifteen-year-old, each staying a month or two until their forever home is found. Fostering teaches you that every animal has a personality as distinct as any person's, just more honest. Animals don't deceive to get what they want; they simply are, the way children simply are, unfiltered and living fully in the moment. I get along famously with both.
I'm also the neighbourhood's dog-sitter, free of charge and glad about it. Not every foster story ends gently, and the hard ones are exactly why it matters that someone keeps doing it.
Four years of Fridays
Dinner for thirty-five
I wanted to build something against homelessness. Instead of building first, I went to a shelter to understand first, and I've been cooking there ever since: four years of Friday dinners for thirty-five people, monthly these days. My hospitality years come straight back out of storage, and so does the part of that work I'd missed the most: caring for people, directly.
I even strategise the dishes. The dishwasher has two trays, and I plan the queue so the next load is always staged before a cycle ends; we finish well before the next shift arrives. Some people find it funny how seriously I take a sink. I find it relaxing: it's a pipeline, and pipelines can always run smoother.
What stays with me is how generous people can be when they own almost nothing: the laughter over a shared meal, a game of pool, an evening of telly together. Whether you are poor or rich, it shouldn't be that much different.
A lesson from the nineties
Boil only what you need
As a teenager I watched a TV programme where someone explained they only ever boil as much water as the cup needs. It never left me: why take more than you need, from the earth or from anyone? Ten years ago a documentary connected that instinct to what was on my plate, and I decided to try a week without animal products. The week simply never ended.
I don't preach about it; it's just my part. The surprise was what the constraint gave back: I cook more creatively and eat more mindfully than I ever did before. Take only what you need, and you notice how much you actually have.
Thirteen years of London nights
Fifty people and a band
London gave me everything from stadium shows to rooms the size of a living room, and the small rooms win. My favourite is the Shacklewell Arms in Dalston, where the stage is built like the front of a little house, roof and window and all, and fifty true music lovers watch bands play as if from their own home. Sometimes you see a band there a couple of years before the world does.
That's the London I chose and kept: concerts, theatre, a good meal, a different kind of street every mile. I'm almost disappointed I moved here first, because it ruined every other city for me.
What the people around me say
Albany Smith, Customer Success Executive (colleague, 3+ years)"Sjoerd is warm and genuine, a very cherished part of our team as a human as well as an absolute powerhouse of a data engineer! He has been a core pillar in both the daily runnings and longer-term success of our team, underpinning everything we do with the processes and platforms he has built himself."
Peter Konopka, Head of Data and AI (direct manager)"He combines solid engineering fundamentals (Azure, PySpark, Python, SQL) with a strong product and business mindset, which is rare and highly valuable. He is reliable, works autonomously, and takes full ownership of his deliverables, consistently going beyond baseline expectations. I would confidently recommend Sjoerd to any organisation looking for a competent data professional who delivers real business value, not just pipelines and dashboards."
Work with me
Three doors, one conversation.
A full-time role
Open to senior AI and forward deployed engineering roles where the job is embedding with a business and shipping systems that stick.
Consulting
Available for engagements with a defined outcome: an AI workflow in production, a data platform that runs itself, a team enabled to keep compounding without me.
Freewave Apps Ltd
My company builds product prototypes end to end, design to deployed, the way this site and Courting were built.
Want the conventional CV? Email me and I'll send the current version, tailored to what you're hiring for.