Top expert inNatural Language Processing and Machine Learning Technologies
Akela Drissner-schmid is a Technical PM and former head of Solutions Engineering with eight years of experience building and scaling conversational AI and API products from R&D to production. Based in Berlin, she combines hands-on backend and DevOps work—contributing to prominent open-source projects like Rasa (core, SDK and demo) where she implemented logging, tokenization fixes and CI/CD automation—with leadership roles driving customer success and solutions across startups and enterprise customers. Her background in AI (MSc, University of Edinburgh) and time as a machine learning engineer give her a rare blend of technical depth and customer-facing strategic experience, evidenced by projects improving Fortune 500 conversational assistants. Colleagues rely on her to translate complex ML systems into operational, secure deployments and measurable business outcomes.
8 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Master's degree, Artificial Intelligence, Master's degree, Artificial Intelligence at The University of Edinburgh
:tiger: Sara - the Rasa Demo Bot: An example of a contextual AI assistant built with the open source Rasa Stack
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
Contributions:1 review, 265 commits, 64 PRs in 3 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Akela's primary contributions involve setting up and modifying the deployment scripts and infrastructure for the Rasa demo bot. They worked on Docker image builds, deployment configurations, and the CI/CD pipeline, indicating a focus on automating the deployment process. The commits also show modifications to the remote agent configuration and integrations, demonstrating an understanding of the bot's architecture and deployment environment. These changes ensure the bot's smooth deployment and operation within a production environment.
SDK for the development of custom actions for Rasa
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:8 reviews, 32 commits, 7 PRs in 1 year 3 months
Contributions summary:Akela primarily contributed to the Rasa SDK, focusing on back-end logic and API functionality. Their work included fixing bugs and making improvements to existing files, such as `executor.py`, `endpoint.py`, and `forms.py`. The user added features like active form tracking and handled error messages for improved debugging. They also refactored code related to form validation and deprecated components based on roadmap changes.
custom-actionspythonrasasdk
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