Thijmen J. Kurk

Senior Applied AI Engineer / Data Scientist
Zwolle, The Netherlands

thijmen.j.kurk@gmail.com
+31 6 27 404 770
Bilingual: Dutch and English
Driver's License: B

Applied AI engineer with a computer science master's degree and a strong quantitative background in software, machine learning, and large-scale systems. I build AI-enabled products end to end, from experimentation and validation to production integration, observability, and operational improvement. My work spans unstructured data, model-backed user experiences, and high-performance data systems, with a focus on making technically advanced solutions reliable and usable in practice.

Technical Skills

Languages: Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, Java, C#, SQL

Data & AI: PyTorch, Pandas, NumPy, Spark, machine learning, LLM product integration, model observability, unstructured data processing

Engineering & DevOps: Docker, Git, Bash, FastAPI, .NET Core, ASP.NET, API design, testing, CI/CD, Azure DevOps

Platforms & Architecture: Azure, AWS, distributed systems, event-driven architectures, performance optimization, Redis, RabbitMQ

Frontend: React, HTML, CSS, Astro, Angular

Education

• 2018 - 2022 / Master Computer Science (joint degree), 8.6, cum laude
  Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and University of Amsterdam
  • Thesis on data management challenges in microservice architectures, including distributed transactions, data consistency, and service integration, implemented in Java.
  • Developed a reusable approach for coordinating transactions and synchronizing a relational model across services.
  • Validated the approach through end-to-end and manual testing.
• 2017 - 2018 / Pre-Master Computer Science, 9.2
  Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
• 2014 - 2017 / Bachelor HBO-ICT, 8.5
  University of Applied Sciences Windesheim

Work Experience

• 2024 - Present / Senior Software Engineer @ Wehkamp
  Zwolle, The Netherlands
  
  • Helped drive AI adoption by introducing Langfuse for observability, contributing to the shopping assistant, and building a PIM-focused AI concept that won first place in an internal hackathon.
  • Implemented image segmentation and classification model integrations for image-processing workflows in production, working with unstructured visual data in an operational setting.
  • Built the Image Management System (IMS) from the ground up to replace Wehkamp's legacy image platform, building both frontend and backend for a modern internal product serving 30+ users and processing up to 30,000 images per day.
  • Improved order management performance by 10x in a core workflow by addressing processing bottlenecks.
  • Contributed to high-performance infrastructure projects, including systems for merging multiple data streams efficiently and an internal tool for Kafka topic migration during broker decommissioning.
• 2023 - 2024 / Senior Software Developer @ Suneco
  Zwolle, The Netherlands
  
  • Developed custom software projects in close collaboration with clients, combining backend engineering, data processing, and delivery in production settings.
  • At Innofeet, helped migrate a legacy portal from C# and ASP.NET 4.5 to .NET 8, splitting the monolith into a separate API and web application.
  • Led a team of two developers, built the API, and set up OTAP environments in Azure.
  • Created migration tooling, including automation for converting synchronous code to asynchronous code and a validator that compared millions of database rows to verify the new system against the legacy implementation, giving the team a systematic way to test correctness at scale.
• 2019 - Present / Co-founder (part-time, alongside employment) @ Exante.ai
  Zwolle, The Netherlands
  
  • Built and shipped software products and consultancy projects alongside full-time employment, with a focus on AI-enabled user experiences, backend systems, and data-driven product delivery.
  • Built an automatic student-internship allocation system for StageMonitor using a minimum-cost flow algorithm to match students to healthcare internships.
  • Built ApeelingAI, a SaaS platform for dynamic, context-aware chatbots that has served 1,000+ users, including retrieval and prompt orchestration for grounded responses.
  • Created GPT-Detective, an early Dutch-language AI text detection tool used by 10,000+ users to scan 55,000 documents, working with unstructured text data at production scale.
  • Developed Lovitations, a boutique wedding website platform with AI-assisted copy and RSVP flows, and MijnRouwkaart, a digital funeral card and memorial-page platform for sharing practical information, condolences, and memories in a respectful way.
• 2020 / Intern @ Databricks
  Amsterdam, The Netherlands
  
  • Selected from 1,100+ candidates for an internship project at Databricks.
  • Researched Spark scheduler improvements for interactive workloads, optimizing the existing scheduler and developing a new architecture that separated scheduler logic from RPC processing, batched status updates, and deployed multiple schedulers in parallel.
  • In prototype testing on Spark 3.1.0, the new design improved throughput by 17x and achieved sub-millisecond latency in large clusters.
  • The work also exposed network and central RPC queue bottlenecks at scale, strengthening my experience with data-intensive systems and experimental validation.
• 2018 - 2019 / Teaching Assistant @ Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
  Amsterdam, The Netherlands
  • Teaching Assistant for Advanced Programming and Statistical Methods courses.
  • Guided and graded bachelor students on theoretical and practical assignments in Scala and R, including coaching and feedback on analytical work.
• 2017 - 2018 / Software Engineer @ Körbler
  Graz, Austria
  • Worked on client-facing software projects in an international environment after completing my internship.
• 2017 / Bachelor Graduation Internship @ NCIM Group
  The Hague, The Netherlands
  • Completed my graduation internship on a professional software project as part of the HBO-ICT program.
• 2017 / Bachelor Internship @ Körbler
  Graz, Austria
  • Completed an internship in Austria focused on practical software engineering in a production setting.

Projects & Certifications

• 2024 / AI-102: Azure AI Engineer Associate
• 2024 / AZ-204: Azure Developer Associate
• 2019 / Earth Imaging Time-Travel Animations
  • Analyzed, processed, and visualized Landsat satellite imagery.
  • Built the LSDE Earth Viewer to observe geolocation changes over time using Web Mercator projection.
• 2019 / An Empirical Analysis of JavaScript Dead Code in the Wild
  • Investigated the effect of JavaScript dead code on mobile web app load time and energy consumption.