Lars Yencken is a seasoned engineering leader and former computational linguistics researcher with 15+ years building data-driven products and teams across health, research, and AI. He has held CTO-like roles at Lifesum and led engineering at Our World in Data and FAR.AI, combining hands-on full-stack development with organisation-level improvements in culture and delivery. Lars’s work spans machine learning, web systems and language research—his hobby project the Great Language Game collected audio for 102 languages and reached 3.2M users, reflecting a talent for turning research into widely adopted products. An active contributor to open-source data-visualisation tooling (notably enhancements to the owid-grapher), he bridges product, data and engineering with a strong focus on downstream impact. Based in Geneva, he pairs a PhD in computational linguistics with pragmatic operational experience, making him adept at shipping reliable, mission-driven technology.
A platform for creating interactive data visualizations
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Contributions:103 reviews, 196 commits, 163 PRs in 1 year 7 months
Contributions summary:Lars primarily focused on enhancing the front-end and back-end functionality of the `owid-grapher` project. They made several changes related to the integration with a Wordpress backend, including disabling features when the Wordpress API is unavailable and modifying routes. The user also streamlined the setup process, updating import scripts, and improving the user interface, as well as improving the facet charts.
Contributions:15 commits, 1 push in 5 years 9 months
data-filespython
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