Now

Director of Research and Incubation, Raw Power Labs

I run the research-to-product portfolio at an applied AI lab in the Archon Group: a stage-gated pipeline across more than ten concurrent bets, with explicit build, partner and kill decisions, and one product line taken from a blank sheet to market fit in two years. I lead ten people across research, engineering and product, and I ship code in the products I bet on.

A decade across all three sides of enterprise AI: buyer at First National Bank, vendor at DataRobot and Abacus.AI, builder at Raw Power Labs. Started as a quantitative analyst building credit scorecards and terabyte-scale pipelines, and never stopped shipping. Master's in Operations Research, cum laude, Stellenbosch University.

Built

Most of my work lives in private repositories. This is what is in them.

Autonomous multi-agent platform

601 commits56,500 linesPython, Rust, TypeScript, Bashbuilt solo in five months

Orchestrates AI runner CLIs against markdown task specs, with success-criteria review loops, retries, git-worktree isolation and an orchestrator-managed pull-request flow for code tasks. Native desktop app, CI with lint and tests. Production record: 333 completed autonomous tasks across about twenty projects, around 800 generated reports, and 122 consecutive automated daily briefs. Since generalised into the team-wide knowledge base, running on our own GPUs.

Embeddable graph database in Rust

231 commits31,000 linesCypherC FFI and Python APIs

Library-first, broad Cypher support, graph algorithms, and bindings for C and Python. Started as a personal project, graduated into a team project, and is now the embedded graph store inside a knowledge-graph engine for game-narrative consistency that the lab has in development.

On-device language-model platform

originated itfine-tuning MVP in ten monthspatent pending

Shipped the automated fine-tuning MVP and built the evaluation stack: BLEU, ROUGE and METEOR, LLM-as-judge scoring, JSON-validity checks and prompt-version tracking. A 500 MB CPU-only model beat a frontier API model on latency at matched quality, which became the joint demo case in a technology partnership with a global semiconductor leader. The core method is patent pending.

Android app for on-device model evaluation

llama.cppfull benchmark suitei8mm kernel paths

Runs and benchmarks the small language models we train, with a full UI, in-app model download and on-device execution. Roughly doubled the upstream open-source codebase it started from: llama.cpp integration, templated chat and a complete on-device benchmark suite, later extended with CPU kernel optimisations.

How this was built. Much of the code above was written with LLM assistance. I build agentic harnesses for a living and use them daily on my own work. The architecture, the reviews and the judgement about what was worth building are mine; a good share of the keystrokes were not. That is what engineering looks like for me in 2026, and I would rather say so than have you assume otherwise.

Experience

Buyer, vendor, builder

2024 to now

Director of Research and Incubation

Raw Power Labs (Archon Group), Copenhagen, remote from Amsterdam

  • Took the on-device small language model platform from zero to product-market fit with paying customers in two years; originated it and built its evaluation stack.
  • Authored the product-line strategy, portfolio revenue model and enterprise pricing architecture used in an active investment process. Redesigned pricing from per-model metering to flat platform fees gated by production use cases.
  • Landed a technology partnership with a global semiconductor leader, re-engaging a stalled relationship through to approved co-marketing.
  • Built the academic pipeline: a published university collaboration and a funded industry-track PhD proposal.

2022 to 2024

Director of Data Science

Abacus.AI, Amsterdam

  • One of two worldwide leads building the Customer Success Data Science team, and the banking specialist: landed the company's first bank customer and owned every bank after it.
  • Shipped customer-facing generative AI on the platform: custom chat LLMs and agents across several industries. Cut a prospect's sales forecasting error by half, a measured six million dollars in labour cost.

2020 to 2022

Senior Data Scientist, Customer Facing Data Scientist

DataRobot, Johannesburg and Amsterdam

  • Foundational lead of a three-person Middle East and Africa presales team; worked with more than three dozen organisations across two continents. EMEA subject matter expert on MLOps, monitoring and governance.
  • Built, deployed and integrated a churn model into a state-owned bank's Oracle estate in three days, against a prior six-month manual effort. Helped a bank rebuild its real-time fraud model: half the false negatives at the same alert volume.

2015 to 2020

Quantitative Analyst, then Senior Quantitative Analyst

First National Bank, Johannesburg

  • Credit origination and collections scorecards, fraud, forecasting, A/B testing, and model-monitoring frameworks built from first principles.
  • Built the bank's first bespoke subsidiary scorecard, cutting the default rate by 150 basis points in its first year, and pipelines processing 15 terabytes of transactional data a day.

Talks and papers

Selected work

  • PatentInventor, A Method for Creating Specialized Language Models, application PA/2025/30389, approved for PCT international filing (2026).
  • TalkResearch Log: From Relegation to Incubation. Game Days AI Summit, Malmö, April 2026.
  • TalkIEEE Conference on Games, 2026, and AI and Games, November 2026.
  • JournalTwo agent-based modelling and simulation papers on delaying the evolution of pest resistance to Bt sugarcane. Journal of Economic Entomology 116(4), 2023, first author, and 118(1), 2025.
  • WebinarMLOps and Challenger Models Help Banks Make More Informed Decisions. Banking Dive, 2021.
  • TalkEnd-to-End AI Is Possible, And Even Easy, For Any Enterprise. DataCon Africa, 2021.
  • WritingHow AI Can Help Banks Navigate the COVID-19 Disruption. DataRobot blog, 2021.
PythonRustTypeScriptSQL agentic architecturesevaluation pipelineson-device and small language modelsknowledge graphsOpenTelemetryMLOpsoperations research

Contact

Get in touch

Based in Amsterdam and authorised to work in the Netherlands. Email is the reliable channel.