hi, i'm raphael

Currently, I work remotely as a Senior Engineer at Inscribe, a YC-backed SaaS startup focused on fraud detection.

My work includes building and maintaining, within a small team, an LLM-powered fraud and compliance agent that automates tedious manual workflows, increasing scalability, and working with customers to improve it continuously. Furthermore, I am working on document parsing, cost-cutting, API integrations, API design, and document classification, as well as taking part in a company-wide on-call rotation.

At Inscribe, I get to work with a uniquely talented team, which is the best part of the job. Other aspects I like about working in a fast-moving startup are: working end-to-end — talking with customers, figuring out a solution, building it, and iterating; being able to work as a generalist across the entire product offering; and the lack of bureaucracy — being able to go straight from idea to implementation without the boundaries of departments and layers of management.

My first full-time job was at Klarna in Stockholm, where I spent three years as a data scientist and later senior data scientist in credit underwriting. My work covered the full machine learning lifecycle from building ETL pipelines for training data through feature selection and model evaluation to testing and deployment.

Later, my focus shifted more towards engineering, and I implemented credit policies and wrote low-latency inference code. Furthermore, I had the chance to work with lots of smart folks including data scientists, analysts, managers, lawyers, and engineers and made great friends.

My first tech job was working as a data scientist at Blumatix, a software consulting company-turned-product startup in Salzburg. I got the job during my second semester of studies and worked there half-time for three years.

My work included building machine learning models for parsing key details from invoices, managing data labeling, and developing a document clustering algorithm. Most importantly, I learned how to work in a software engineering team dealing with complex tasks and uncertainty. Working at Blumatix gave me the opportunity to learn from the best and have a blast along the way.

Originally, I studied molecular biology at the University of Vienna. During my master's, I got into computational biology and bioinformatics and found it so interesting that I moved from the lab bench to the keyboard. During my master's project at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, I picked up a bunch of coding and data analysis skills and found out that these skills were in high demand in the tech industry. Since I enjoyed the process of coding and data analysis and wasn't too keen on an academic career, I set my sights on the tech industry.

I went on to get my master's in data science at the University of Salzburg with a focus on computer science, statistics, and machine learning. The program also included really cool collaborations with companies to apply machine learning in the real world. Most importantly, in the second semester, the guys from Blumatix gave me a shot and hired me to work half-time as a data scientist. Working in a small team with super-smart folks taught me more than a degree ever could. Studying and working in parallel was a pretty busy time overall, but it was fantastic for learning quickly.