Olivier Van Laere
Principal Machine Learning Engineer at Apple
Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolOlivier Van Laere is a Principal Machine Learning Engineer with 13+ years building large-scale search, retrieval and recommendation systems, currently shaping multi-domain search used across Apple’s global ecosystem. He combines deep academic roots—a PhD in georeferencing text and extensive web-scale mining of social media—with hands-on production experience deploying ranking and personalization at tens of millions of users. At startups and tech giants alike he has moved models from prototype to production, architecting data pipelines and ML systems in Python, Hadoop/MapReduce and modern ML stacks. His work uniquely blends geographic information retrieval and NLP, enabling location-aware relevance at web scale. Based in Zurich, he pairs research-grade rigor with product-minded engineering and a history of leadership under pressure—honed in part by years as a lifeguard and community organizer.
13 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Wetenschappen - Wiskunde, Wetenschappen - Wiskunde at St. LeocollegeDoctor of Computer Science Engineering Computer Science, Doctor of Computer Science Engineering Computer Science at Ghent UniversityUniversitat Politècnica de València
Dutch, English, French, Spanish, German
Stackoverflow
21reputation
580reached
2answers
1question
Github Skills (22)
mapreduce6
python6
emr6
user-defined-function6
hadoop6
apache-pig6
read-write4
apache-hive3
serde-json3
spark-ml3
java3
scala2
apache2
scikit2
spark2
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
ovlaere/placing-text
Mar 2013 - Oct 2016
Contributions:81 commits, 6 pushes, 2 branches in 3 years 7 months
ovlaere/spatial_feature_selection
Dec 2012 - Dec 2012
Contributions:4 commits in 3 days
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