Max Jakob
Tech Lead at Elastic
Berlin, Germany
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMax Jakob is a seasoned tech lead and principal engineer with 15 years of experience building scalable search, NLP, and data extraction systems from research prototypes to production. Based in Berlin, he has led engineering and data science teams at Elastic, Ecosia, and SoundCloud, blending hands-on backend development with people leadership and product-facing delivery. His academic background is in NLP with dual master's degrees and a bachelor’s in the field, which underpins deep expertise in language understanding and information extraction. A long-time contributor to DBpedia projects, he has improved core annotation, disambiguation, and Wikipedia extraction pipelines—work that sits at the intersection of knowledge graphs and practical NLP. Colleagues rely on him for clarifying complex data-quality issues and shipping robust integration fixes across large codebases. He combines research-grade thinking with pragmatic engineering to drive measurable improvements in search relevance and data reliability.
15 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor’s Degree Natural Language Processing, Bachelor’s Degree Natural Language Processing at Heidelberg UniversityMaster’s Degree (double degree) Natural Language Processing, Master’s Degree (double degree) Natural Language Processing at Universität des SaarlandesMaster’s Degree (double degree) Natural Language Processing, Master’s Degree (double degree) Natural Language Processing at Charles University
English, German
Stackoverflow
1,895reputation
66kreached
3answers
0questions
google-visualization
top-1%
Github Skills (19)
java10
scala10
javas10
google-visualization10
data-extraction10
ontology9
nlpjs7
natural-language-processing7
nlp7
soundcloud6
dbpedia6
rest-api5
api-design5
restful-api5
api-rest5
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
dbpedia-spotlight/dbpedia-spotlight
Jan 2011 - Sep 2013
DBpedia Spotlight is a tool for automatically annotating mentions of DBpedia resources in text.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:123 commits in 2 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Max primarily contributed to back-end code, focusing on improving and adding to the functionality of the DBpedia Spotlight tool. The commits show changes in Java and Scala files, indicating modifications to core data loading, context extraction, and disambiguation logic. Several commits added libraries and updated the Project Object Model (POM), reflecting dependency management work in the project.
dbpediadbpedia-spotlightnlpsemantic-webentity-linking
dbpedia/extraction-framework
Mar 2011 - Mar 2012
The software used to extract structured data from Wikipedia
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:253 commits, 1 issue in 1 year
Contributions summary:Max made several code changes focused on resolving namespace conflicts, adding comments to Freebase scripts, and deprecating/replacing methods within the codebase. These modifications indicate a focus on improving code clarity and resolving issues related to data extraction and integration. The contributions also included bug fixes related to redirect functionality, suggesting involvement in data quality improvements.
pythonstructured-datastructuredwikipedia
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