Gothenburg, Sweden

Most of my work
starts where
someone else stopped.

Data scientist and AI engineer at one of the Nordics’ largest B2B distributors — ~50 bn SEK, 7,000+ people across Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland. I tend to end up with the things that stalled — a document-parsing pilot four years deep, a conversion problem nobody had measured properly. The modelling is rarely the hard part. Reading the business accurately enough to know what would actually create value is.

Now — Data Scientist at Ahlsell. LLM document automation, a measured conversion framework, and the Azure / Databricks machinery underneath both.

Open to senior individual-contributor and lead roles across data science, AI engineering, analytics and solutions work — and to consulting conversations. I care more about the problem than the job title.

Kristofer DeYoung
Employer scale
~50 bn SEK
Nordic markets served
SE · NO · DK · FI
Commercial & leadership
10+ yrs

What I do

Three things, and the plumbing between them

Most of my week is one of these. The rest is arguing gently with a stakeholder about what the number actually means.

Reading the problem

The part I am actually good at. Understanding a commercial process well enough to see where the value really sits — which is usually not where the brief says it is. Several projects I now own had been technically attempted and abandoned before I got them; what was missing was rarely a better model.

Building the whole thing

Terraform and Kubernetes, Azure and Databricks, dbt models, Azure ML pipelines, backend services and API endpoints, and the front end someone opens on a Monday. Not because I want to be a generalist — because a half-built system creates nothing.

Proving it worked

Holdout groups, evaluation harnesses, actual-versus-target reporting. If a thing cannot be measured against what would have happened anyway, I would rather not claim it did anything. This is also the fastest way to find out you were wrong.

Selected work

Three problems worth describing

Employer work is written up without naming internal systems, customers or figures. The thesis and the open-source projects are entirely mine and fully open.

All work, in detail

Kristofer presenting at a laptop

Why me, specifically

I have been on the other side of the dashboard

I bought my first share at thirteen. What started as an interest in economics turned into a habit of insisting on evidence — in my own company, in how I run property and personal finances, on the boards I sit on, and in every commercial role I have held. Retail management was one arena for that. It was never the point.

The point is that I have spent years being the person a model gets handed to. I have owned a P&L, set prices, negotiated with suppliers and defended a range to people with strong opinions. So I know which number a category manager will not believe, why the model that wins on validation loses on Monday, and what a recommendation has to look like before anyone changes an order because of it.

That is also why I tend to be handed things that stalled. Several of the projects I now own had smart people on them before me and did not ship. What was missing was almost never technical.

The longer story

Toolkit

What I reach for

Listed by how often I actually use it, not by how it looks on a keyword filter.

Daily

PythonSQLAzureDatabricksdbtPower BI & DAXGit

Cloud & platform

TerraformKubernetesDockerAzure DevOps & CI/CDKafkaDelta / Spark

ML & AI systems

Azure ML pipelinesMLOpsscikit-learnClusteringForecastingHoldout & A/B measurementAzure OpenAIDocument extractionEvaluation harnesses

Product surfaces

REST API designBackend servicesReact / ViteStreamlitPower BI templates

Say hello

If any of this is useful to you, write.

Roles, collaborations, a second opinion on a modelling problem, or a question about getting a language model to behave on messy documents — all welcome.