Hi there! Thanks for checking out my blog.

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My name is Rick Lamers. I’m a Machine Learning Engineer and I live in Amsterdam.

Previously, I ran a startup called Orchest. We built a workflow orchestration tool not unlike Apache Airflow. We had an open source project and offered a managed cloud service to run said open source project. We raised $4.15M but ended up giving the capital back to our investors (Gradient Ventures, Basis Set Ventures, Seedcamp, Script Capital, Data Community Fund and angels like Anthony Goldbloom) because we believed the market was too commoditized. We were able to return about $2M to investors. In addition, we were able to sell some of the developed IP in a 5-figure deal.

Today I’m focused on developing robust and scalable (distributed) ML systems. From data engineering to model inference & monitoring in production (batch + streaming).

Some of the technologies I work with: Ray, (Py)Spark, PyTorch, Hugging Face, Python, Starlette, Kubernetes

Talks

Podcasts

Notable open source projects

Tutorials

Work

  • 2023
    • Senior Machine Learning Engineer: say hi.
  • 2020-2023
    • Technical Co-Founder & CEO of Orchest
  • 2018
  • 2016
    • Research Software Developer at Keadyn
  • 2011-2017
    • Owner of Web Development Agency
    • Developed & sold a document processing system at age 16

Education

  • 2017-2019

    • I studied Computer Science (MSc.) at TU Delft. After having passed all courses (7.8/10 GPA) I was prepping for writing a thesis on model regularization in the Pattern Recognition group. Shortly after that commenced I dropped out to found Orchest.

  • 2015-2017

  • 2011-2015