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Emil Rijcken

@emilrijcken

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PhD-level NLP researcher and AI engineer building production-ready generative AI systems.

Netherlands

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What I'm looking for

I seek hands-on roles building production-grade generative AI and NLP systems, with opportunities to lead small teams, influence product roadmaps, and apply research to real-world products.

I am a PhD-level NLP researcher and entrepreneurial AI engineer with 7+ years of combined university and industry experience, focused on practical, first-principles innovation in generative AI and language technologies.

As Co-Founder & AI Lead at a venture-backed design-tech start-up, I helped raise €1.6M and productionized multimodal UI generation systems, embedding search, and latency-optimized chat agents while maintaining a largely hands-on engineering role.

In academia I research explainable document classification, have published 12 peer-reviewed papers (7 first-author), teach MSc-level NLP, and maintain the open-source fuzzytm Python package with substantial usage.

I lead small ML teams, establish engineering best practices, and combine research rigor with product-focused development to ship scalable, maintainable AI systems that impact users and stakeholders.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Co-Founder & AI Lead

Current

Seldon Digital

May 2023 - Present (2 years 5 months)

Co-founded a pre-seed SaaS design-tech startup and raised €1.6M; productionized multimodal UI generation, latency-optimized chat agents, and embedding-based semantic search for product launch readiness.

Python fastAPI Faiss Docker CI CD Embeddings

Current

PhD Candidate NLP

Current

Eindhoven University of Technology

Jan 2020 - Present (5 years 9 months)

Conducting PhD research on explainable document classification with 12 peer-reviewed papers (7 first-author) and co-designed MSc NLP course while supervising student theses.

Natural Language Processing PyTorch Transformers Topic modeling Research Teaching Scientific Writing

NLP Researcher

Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica

Jan 2019 - Jul 2019 (6 months)

Implemented topic modeling and classification algorithms for suicide-risk detection in helpline chat logs, improving automated risk signals for intervention workflows.

Topic modeling Classification Python Gensim Data Processing NLP

Analyst / Thesis Intern

Deloitte Consulting

Sep 2016 - Aug 2018 (1 year 11 months)

Automated data-collection pipelines and built interactive QlikView dashboards; developed a customer-facing chatbot for a leading Dutch retailer to improve customer engagement.