Meet Hendrik, our Director of Data Science and Analytics

👋 Hey Hendrik, great to chat to you today! Could you please introduce yourself?

Hi! My name is Hendrik and I’m leading the data team at Tide. We help the company make smart decisions about data, create reports, build machine learning models and make sure that the data we have is of high quality.

How would you describe your journey at Tide in three words?

Growing

Learning

Improving

You joined the team in July 2019. What’s the most interesting challenge you’ve come across since?

The pace of growth! The Data team has grown from almost zero to almost 40 people in two years and I have had to reinvent our organisation and what my role is multiple times over the course of that journey.

And what a journey! What’s the best thing about working at Tide?

It’s clearly the people that I work with. It fills me with joy to see that we managed to form a community of smart and driven people. Even more so when I see people develop and live up to the new challenges that are being put in front of them.

What’s something that happened recently at Tide that made you smile?

I love to see people take ownership of problems, learn how to fix them and then make those solutions available to everyone, not just to themselves. One of my team members recently demonstrated this when he created a process for sourcing parties, and shared it with the wider team. I couldn’t help but smile when I saw the passion that he had to make our whole organisation a bit better!

Why should other data scientists choose to join Tide?

Many reasons! Firstly, we are still a young organisation that allows individuals to make significant contributions to our organisation instead of being a cog in a big machine. Secondly, I think that Tide is a great place to learn, adopting modern MLOPs (Machine Learning Operations) ideas and technologies, such as feature stores. Thirdly, I think that, given how fast we are growing, there are many new roles and opportunities for data scientists to help develop their careers.

When you’re not at Tide, what’s your favourite thing to do?

I love learning, so I like reading and playing games, specifically chess. To exercise, I like to play squash.