CARDAAI, built to matter.

I was asked to build the architecture of a Demand-Side Platform (DSP) in 2023 by Frans Vermeulen, who I thank for then recommending me for promotion into a manager role. I only wanted to do it if I was given the guarantee to do 50% coding on the side, which I had to request from the CTO at the time, which was Jurrie van Rooijen.

I started with two of my direct reports. After 1 year, 8 teams were working on this solution as its profit was over 100M EUR/year, of which 8M per year cost saving due to building in house solutions. It was a very cool problem, as it combined search solutions (NLP), recommender systems and auctioning logic. And it needed to be very fast.

After two years of management experience, I decided I was missing the coding too much, and I transferred into the role of Data Science Craft Lead for Shopping and Advertising, the largest domain of bol.

During a two-day hackathon, I created a natural language microservice (‘Oscar’) which evaluates comments of returned products, generating 400.000 EUR/year.

I like this project because it was super fun to create, and it signifies the power of being able to completely deploy a service on your own. Things don't always need to be complicated if you have the right tools and surroundings.

Not the most life-changing tool, but a fun example of how a hands-on innovation can be made with relative ease.