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Börkur SigurbjörnssonBS

Börkur Sigurbjörnsson

Information Scientist | Data Engineer | Applied AI

€500/day
Paris, FR
15+ years

Average response time: 1 hour

About Börkur

Search Quality Engineering for Domain-Specific Knowledge Systems

I help teams build domain-specific search and RAG systems that are measurable, debuggable, and transparent. I combine classic information retrieval, modern embedding-based retrieval, and systematic relevance evaluation to improve answer quality.

Retrieval Architecture Design

☑️ Dense, keyword, and hybrid retrieval strategies tailored to your corpus
☑️ Indexing and chunking strategies optimized for recall and precision
☑️ Query processing and ranking design for domain-specific search intent

Relevance Evaluation and Tuning

☑️ Gold-set creation and relevance labeling workflow
☑️ Offline metrics and error analysis to identify ranking failure modes
☑️ Iterative tuning of retrievers, rerankers, and prompts

RAG Quality Engineering

☑️ Retrieval-aware RAG pipeline design with grounded responses
☑️ Provenance and citation-first answer generation patterns
☑️ Guardrails and fallback behavior for low-confidence queries

Content Acquisition and Ingestion

☑️ Focused crawling and ingestion pipelines with provenance tracking
☑️ Deduplication, normalization, and metadata enrichment
☑️ Search-ready data preparation for sustained quality

Selected Relevant Experience

☑️ Built focused access to urban-policy and infrastructure evidence through automated content curation and search/browse workflows. (Urbanixm)
☑️ Built in-house Dutch readability classification and evaluation benchmarks that outperformed commercial alternatives, enabling age-appropriate search and educator tooling. (WizeNoze)
☑️ Built ranking and faceted exploration capabilities for large-scale search use cases reaching millions of users. (Yahoo! Labs)

Why Work With Me

☑️ 15+ years of search, IR, NLP, and applied ML across research and production
☑️ Evaluation-first mindset: measurable quality over black-box claims
☑️ Hands-on delivery from ingestion and indexing to product-facing retrieval UX
  • English

    Native or bilingual

  • Spanish

    Fluent

  • French

    Basic

Can work on-site
Paris (up to 10km)

Experience

  • borkur.net
    Data & AI Engineer
    TECH
    January 2023 - Today (3 years and 5 months)
    Paris, France
    Freelance applied scientist and engineer with engagements spanning LLM/RAG document-intelligence pipelines for post-trade finance operations, geospatial and climate-data prototypes supporting customer discovery in early-stage startups, and embedded control software for art installations and wearable systems. Consistent focus on helping small teams move quickly from idea to validated, demonstrable outcomes.
    Python Data science Machine learning LLMs RAG
  • Urbanixm
    Urban Information Scientist
    TECH
    April 2021 - Today (5 years and 2 months)
    Reykjavik, Iceland
    Leading development of the Urban Knowledge Discovery Engine, combining focused web crawling, ML-based content curation, and intelligent search (RAG/LLMs) to give urban professionals structured access to intervention-impact knowledge. In parallel, deliver custom geospatial analysis and decision-support services for clients in real estate and sustainable urban development.
    NLP Architecture and Urban Planning Python Machine learning Data science
  • PLACEMAKE.IO
    Prinicpal Data Engineer
    TECH
    February 2018 - February 2021 (3 years)
    London, United Kingdom
    Principal Data Engineer building urban-data intelligence for real-estate investment—turning 15+ heterogeneous sources into 250+ time series and 10+ combined indices, exposed via APIs and search. Co-developed the core insight system, coordinated agile engineering in a four-person team, enforced data/search quality through systematic evaluation, and shipped an initial MVP in under 3 months.
    Python Elasticsearch Pandas GIS PostgreSQL

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Education

  • Doctor of Philosophy
    University of Amsterdam
    2006
    PhD, Computer Science
  • Master of Science
    University of Amsterdam
    2002
    M.Sc., Logic

Certifications

Skill set

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