Alex de Zwart

LEIDEN AREA, NL

Curious · Analytical · Collaborative · Forward-Thinking

My career is built on not just tackling technical challenges and personal growth, but fundamentally on delivering value through innovation and collaboration. From analyst to core developer, my focus has always been on using technology as a tool to drive meaningful impact.

Experience

Cloud Engineer

PostNL

Contributed as a core developer to the PostNL Profile Cloud, an innovative application designed for the collection and analysis of click data, enabling real-time personalization across PostNL's digital domains. Actively participated in the entire process of migrating to server-side tagging, focusing on first-party data collection. Also built and deployed the serve-side tagging application entirely on AWS. This initiative was aimed at enhancing data accuracy and privacy. Advocated for the PostNL Profile Cloud within various agile teams, showcasing its capabilities to inspire increased adoption. All applications are build using Python and IaC (Infrastructure as Code) using AWS CDK.

Technology stack:
AWS stack: CDK, ALB, Fargate, API Gateway, AWS Lambda, DocumentDB, Neptune, Route53, Github Actions

June 2023 - today

Senior Web Analyst

PostNL

  • Team lead for a group of 6 analysts focused on enhancing data collection and leveraging it for insightful analytics.
  • Leveraged advanced topic modeling techniques to derive actionable insights from customer feedback, enabling data-driven decision-making to enhance service quality.
  • Conducted in-depth analyses of chatbot interactions, optimizing flows to significantly improve user experiences and engagement.
  • Developed and AB-tested personalization strategies, utilizing predictive analytics to anticipate and address frequently asked questions (FAQs).
  • Developed the RAG application using semantic search and vector database technologies to provide precise answers to questions based on the PostNL web corpus.
  • Responsible for overseeing the development and maintenance of a unified data layer package utilized by all agile teams. This initiative standardized data collection practices across platforms, ensuring consistency and accuracy in data analytics and insights.

January 2020 - June 2023

Web Analyst, Multiple Agile Teams

PostNL

  • Managed online data collection through the tag manager, conducting analyses and creating dashboards to visualize insights effectively.
  • Conducted A/B tests and leveraged screen recordings to gain insights, optimizing the parcel flow, including enhancements to the track and trace experience and efforts to reduce customer service calls.
  • Performed customer segmentation analysis to understand diverse customer groups' online behaviors on the portals, facilitating targeted and effective engagement strategies.
  • Optimized webshop conversion rates, driving sales through the development of insightful Power BI dashboards.

December 2018 - December 2020

E-commerce manager

Luiten Food

Managed full webshop project lifecycle: strategy, design, development, testing, and implementation. Creation and management of Adwords, Google Shopping, Bing, and Facebook PPC Accounts PPC utilization of remarketing,dpa, geographical bidding, bid strategies, extensions, and rules. Biggest achievement: Albert Heijn buying the start-up

November 2016 - December 2018

Education

University of Amsterdam

Master in Science
Information studies - Data Science Track

GPA: 7.9

Courses: Applied Machine learning, Big data, Statistics symulations and optimzations, Forecasting in Complex systems, Information retrieval

September 2020 - August 2022

Open Universiteit

Master in Science
Business Process management & IT

GPA: 7.7

Data Governance, Business Intelligence, Enterprise Architecture, Data Analytics

August 2019 - November 2022

Hogeschool inholland

Bachelor business administration
Bedrijfskunde MER
August 2010 - September 2015

Projects

Single Sign On

Running home assistant on my own server, everything is set up using docker and docker compose adhering to Iac principles. I have integrated the following services: Home Assistant, Node-Red, Mosquitto, InfluxDB, Portainer, and a few other services. I have set-up cloudflare tunnel to access my home assistant from the internet, and traefik to manage the SSL certificates, and the routing of the different services.

Adjusted hardware and firmware of a Sonof bridge to catch and repeat the 433mhz signal of roling blinds, and integrated it with Home Assistant and Node-Red to open and close blinds from my phone.

Impelemented SSO for Adobe Analytics, leveraged the Adobe Analytics API'S to programmatically provision users and gain insights in dashboard usage.

Recommender system

Applied a Graph Neural Network (GNN), Vectorized Session K-nearest neighbors to predict next item interaction in a session based recommender system introduced a new smoothing approach for the different layers in the GNN resulting in a higher accuracy.

Attribution model

Applied the Shapley value method to the PostNL marketing channels data, to find the optimal allocation of budgets

Topic modelling

Used HDBSCAN a hierarchical clustering method together with UMAP and BERT (NLP algorithm) to extract topics from our NPS data.

Webscraper

Created a webscraper using AWS Lambda, Docker, Selenium and Python to scrape job vacancie websites.

Skills

Programming Languages & Tools