Our Team
Zeta Alpha is located at Startup Village on the Science Park campus of the University of Amsterdam. With strong ties to the local and global research community, we are motivated by building beautiful and useful products based on the latest AI and natural language understanding technologies. Zeta Alpha is not your typical startup. We are building a team and a company for a long-term prosperous and impactful future.
We have the ambition to change how AI helps people to make better decisions in their work, and the drive to create a new product category to realize this ambition.
Jakub Zavrel
Founder, Technologist, Entrepreneur. Fell in love with AI some 30 years ago. Founder and former CEO of Textkernel. Building a new long lasting, prosperous, and global AI company with a very ambitious goal is what he loves to do. When he is not working or with family, you can find him listening to live music, enjoying a crafty cocktail, running, rowing, or tending to his rooftop garden.
Olga Gureenkova
Graduated as a linguist and gradually switched to working on NLP and software engineering, in both academia and enterprise. She has a special love for developing Question Answering and Search systems, Chabot development, and open source. She likes to create smart algorithms that help people in their everyday life.
Artem Grotov
With a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Amsterdam, on learning algorithms that help users satisfy their information needs, Artem has worked on ML to maintain large IT monitoring systems. At Zeta Alpha he tunes search and recommendation systems to focus your attention to the most interesting papers. Artem likes cooking and spending time in the garden with his wife and his dog.
Victor Zuanazzi
Recent graduate of MSc in AI program at University of Amsterdam. Machine learning, urban cycling and engaging in political discussions is probably how he spends most of his awake hours. Working to win SOTA in neural vector search is his mission at Zeta Alpha. Not surprising given his first name.
Rodrigo Nogueira
Rodrigo aims to use machine learning to boost scientific discoveries. He holds a Ph.D. from NYU, where he worked at the intersection of Deep Learning, NLP, and IR. Besides his role as scientific advisor to Zeta Alpha, he is also a postdoc at the U of Waterloo, an adjunct professor at UNICAMP, and a senior research scientist at NeuralMind.
Fernando Rejon Barrera
Fernando spent some time in academia while completing his PhD in theoretical physics, and afterwards made a switch to industry in order to follow his lifelong passion for technology. He now focuses on software architecture of distributed systems, data engineering, MLOps and cloud infrastructure.
Marzieh Fadaee
During her work as NLP Research Engineer at Zeta Alpha, and with her PhD in Computer Science at the University of Amsterdam on meaning representation in machine translation, Marzieh heads our R&D efforts. Her interests lie in getting insights from data and understanding natural language. When not training understanding models, she’s training her own brain to learn a new language.
Sergi Castella Sapé
With a BSc in Physics, and a Master's in AI, Sergi keeps the pulse for you on all new trends in AI. He is a prolific blogger, the voice of Zeta Alpha on social media, and eager to read and explain as many cool AI papers as he can. A native of Barcelona, he is the most musical of the bunch, and has long good conversations with friends as a hobby.
Shamil Mammadov
Experienced web developer, global citizen, and history buff. Always looking for new challenges in innovative UX. Combines eye for detail as well as strong technical foundation in building large & scalable web applications. Enjoys a good movie, biking and snowboarding. His eyes light up around topics of Central Asian cuisine.
We are looking to grow the team with talented and fun NLP researchers, data, and software engineers (both front end and back end) as well as enterpreneurial sales and marketing leads. If you are interested to join our ambitious mission, please send your CV.