What was your career journey until joining AGC?
My first job was as a software engineer at Google 10 years ago, where I worked in the field of product quality ads. I then joined another team at YouTube where I focused on Content Identification. Followed by a position in a start-up when I moved back to Belgium. When I decided to look for a position with a better commute, AGC offered me a role in an interesting data science team who had to be built almost from scratch. There were decisions to make, an architecture to create so it seemed like an interesting challenge. That’s why I ended up choosing AGC over the other.

What does your role of data scientist consist in?
On a daily basis, 30% of the time is at meetings, either presenting results to internal clients, or gathering information about what they need at the start of a project. The remaining 70% are developing actual solutions and products for those clients. Meaning, researching in the scientific literature existing approaches to the issue, or existing tools, softwares, applications that could work, and then, for example, develop and implement web applications. 

What do you love about your team? 
We’ve been lucky somehow! When I joined the company, there were 2 of us, along with my manager. We expanded the team to 8 people, and they are all really wonderful colleagues. I feel there is always something to learn from them on a technical level. And since we’re a small team and get along well, we work very closely together, which is interesting. 
Everyone has an area of expertise. Those who are more driven by the latest cutting-edge deep learning technology can work on those projects. I am driven by optimization problems, and I get to work on those. We are also free and encouraged to go outside of our comfort zone and explore other topics. It's all very exciting!

What do you like most about working at AGC?
I really enjoy the humility and openness of my co-workers and the fact that everyone is free to say their own opinion whether you started yesterday, or you’ve been in the company for years. It’s important to know - especially in our field - there is not one ground truth, and that every person can have good ideas. I value that quite a lot, as well as the desire to share whatever you know with your colleagues and not just do your work and not worry about the others.  

If you think of the AGC values, which one would you pick? 
I would go with diversity because I feel that our strength as a team is our diverse backgrounds in terms of knowledge, as well as ambitions or in terms of what our lives are at the moment: we have parents with young or older kids, non-parents... Our diversity is in so many ways a real asset.

What are you most looking forward to for the future at AGC?
We have made a lot of progress making our team and its skills known within the company. I hope that we will be able to handle more challenging projects whether it is in terms of technical complexity or the technologies used, or even the scope of them. Over the last 3 years, a lot of the work went into acquiring data, starting small to show the capability of the technologies we have expertise in. Now, we are taking on more and more ambitious projects, and not only about acquiring data but into applying AI to AGC’s business areas. I hope we’ll have more of those. 

What would you say to someone thinking of joining AGC?
It is definitely a challenging environment, especially if you have data science or computer science skills, but it is a great learning opportunity. We were all surprised by what we could learn and achieve, so I would definitely recommend joining us for the opportunity. We are also always happy to welcome interns and students, and we have had several successful candidates. It’s a great experience!

I really enjoy the humility and openness of my co-workers and the fact that everyone is free to say their own opinion whether you started yesterday, or you’ve been in the company for years.