Elias Willemse
Founder at Second Order AI
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolElias Willemse is a founder and AI scientist with a decade of experience building data-driven decision tools and optimisation platforms for logistics, waste management and tender analytics. He previously co-founded and led Waste Labs—taking it from Entrepreneur First to deployed SaaS in Hong Kong and London—where his teams used combinatorial optimisation, ML and robust data pipelines to help clients win over £250M in contracts. Elias combines academic rigour (PhD in Industrial Engineering, research roles at SUTD and University of Geneva) with hands-on product delivery, prototyping production workflows in Kedro, XGBoost and DuckDB. His current work at Second Order AI focuses on responsibly applying AI to tender and bid strategy end-to-end, blending experiment design with business KPI forecasting. He’s comfortable moving between C-level stakeholder engagement and low-level algorithm design (from metaheuristics to entity-resolution scoring). An under-the-radar strength is his ability to validate business cases rapidly under tight deadlines, repeatedly turning analytical prototypes into measurable commercial value.
10 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Industrial Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Industrial Engineering at University of Pretoria
English, Afrikaans
Github Skills (7)
routes6
heuristics6
ats5
logistics4
python4
optimization3
vehicle-routing-problem2
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
WasteLabs/template_kedro_streamlit
Feb 2023 - Mar 2023
A template for streamlit-kedro projects, that uses both.
Contributions:1 release, 47 commits, 6 PRs in 1 month
ejwillemse/app_vukwm_bag_delivery
Dec 2022 - Sep 2023
Contributions:156 PRs, 204 pushes, 61 branches in 8 months
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