About

Ramses Kools

I'm an AI and data engineer based in Amersfoort, Netherlands. I currently work as a Senior AI Engineer at Future Facts, a data and AI consultancy that is part of the Hot ITem Groep, which in turn is part of Conclusion.

My background is a bit unusual for someone in this field. I studied Chemistry at the University of Amsterdam and completed a Bachelor's and Master's degree. My master specialised in computational and theoretical chemistry, which meant building simulation algorithms in C++, running large workloads on compute clusters, and extracting insight from the produced data. My studies taught me many things, but these are some skills I still use daily in my work: a research mindset, the ability to write code for complex systems, and the ability to communicate results clearly.

Zenz Technologies (2019 - 2021)

After graduating I joined Zenz Technologies, a software company in Amsterdam building decision support systems for revenue management. There I worked as a consultant and developer, implementing and customising data processing and visualisation tools for clients, as well as developing the in-house-built C++ libraries.

Future Facts (2022 - Today)

In February 2022 I joined Future Facts, where I have been ever since. Here I started in the Fast Track together with 9 other colleagues. In the Fast Track we learned the basics of big data engineering in the cloud and working as a consultant in data & AI. A whole new world of possibilities opened up for me and I've been diving deeper into this world of advanced data analytics, big data, and cloud engineering ever since.

Through Future Facts, I have worked with two major companies (so far):

KLM (2022 - 2024)

At KLM I was embedded in a software development department in a hybrid role spanning data engineering, DevOps, and software development. My work included modernising the C++ development toolchain and CI/CD practices, contributing to an automatic passenger rebooking system, and working on a machine learning prediction project as a data and AI engineer. I also helped establish a C++ software engineering community within KLM.

PostNL (2024 - present)

At PostNL I work as an AWS Data Engineer, helping develop and maintain a data warehouse environment that supports multiple business units in their data-driven decision making. The stack centres around Redshift, AWS CDK, Glue, Lambda, dbt, and Databricks. The work involves everything from data modelling and pipeline development to infrastructure as code and stakeholder management. At the moment I'm fully focused on migrating and rebuilding everything from a AWS-Redshift environment to a newer dbt-cloud + databricks environment.

What I work on

My primary focus is on the full lifecycle of data platforms: architecture, ingestion, transformation, governance, and delivery to BI and analytics consumers. Day to day that means working with dbt and Databricks as the transformation layer, Redshift and Iceberg as storage, and AWS CDK for infrastructure. I write mostly SQL and Python, with GitHub Actions handling CI/CD across projects.

I have been migrating existing ETL architectures toward a modern lakehouse model. Alongside that I have been developing internal tooling, quality frameworks, and engineering standards to support that shift.

On the AI side, my work at Future Facts increasingly involves applied LLM tooling: integrating language models into workflows, building internal AI tooling, and helping clients understand how to move from experimentation to production.

Certifications

Outside work

I'm working on a 'homelab': a small mini-pc in our closet running a number of self-hosted services. I enjoy tinkering with it and consider it my private digital playground. Currently I'm running media services for my personal videos, photos, movies and series, plus a postgres database where I process my personal finance data via dbt.

I enjoy electronic music and festivals (meet me at Lentekabinet), science fiction audiobooks, and video games.