Zen van Riel

Co-Founder

Netherlands6 yrs 5 mos experience

Most Likely To SwitchAI ML Practitioner

Key Highlights

5+ years of experience in cloud solutions.
Expertise in large language models and AI systems.
Founder of AI Native Engineer community.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a SaaS-focused AI Engineer with extensive experience in cloud solutions and AI product development.

Contact

Skills

Core Skills

Ai EngineeringEducationAi Tools DevelopmentProductivity EnhancementAi InnovationCloud EngineeringCloud SolutionsCloud Solutions ArchitectureSoftware Testing

Other Skills

AI implementationYouTube content creationPython (Programming Language)TypeScriptLarge Language Models (LLM)PythonLLMsKubernetesAzure EngineeringC#JavaScriptCypressTest AutomationMachine LearningArtificial Intelligence

About

My focus: building AI systems that actually work in production, not just in demos.As a Software Engineer I scale real AI solutions in production at GitHub while teaching engineers how to future-proof their careers through practical AI implementation.Outside my day job, I run AI Native Engineer, my YouTube channel and community where I teach you real AI engineering skills. What I bring to the table: → 5+ years shipping cloud solutions → Deep expertise in LLMs, cloud architecture, and full-stack AI systems → Track record of AI products at scaleI believe the best engineers use AI as both a tool to create solutions faster and to implement new features and AI-native platforms that solve real problems.

Experience

Ai native engineer

AI Engineering Educator & Community Founder

Jun 2025 – Present · 10 mos

I help 30k+ beginners and seasoned engineers future-proof their careers by giving them real, useful AI skills.
Teaching engineers AI implementation and AI coding skills through YouTube.
My premium program helps you get jobs and promotions instead of AI being a threat to your career.
Views expressed are always my own and shaped after many nights of independent research next to my engineering job.

AI implementationYouTube content creationAI EngineeringEducation

Github

3 roles

Senior Software Engineer

Promoted

Mar 2025 – Present · 1 yr 1 mo

Developed in-house AI tools to increase Support Engineer productivity via an up-to-date vector database of hundreds of thousands of Support Tickets
Used organically to investigate hundreds of Support Tickets daily without enforced AI usage
70% positive feedback rate (above industry standard)
Scaling Copilot in GitHub Support beyond millions of total conversations to solve any GitHub question in the universe
FY25 Impact Award Winner

Python (Programming Language)TypeScriptLarge Language Models (LLM)AI Tools DevelopmentProductivity Enhancement

Software Engineer III

Mar 2024 – Mar 2025 · 1 yr

Scaling Copilot in GitHub Support to 1000+ daily conversations
Integrating Support Grounding for the main Copilot product via function calling written in Go
Standardizing the AI system to extend it to GitHub Docs and other entrypoints in TypeScript

Software Engineer II

Sep 2022 – Mar 2024 · 1 yr 6 mos

Directly responsible for AI innovation projects:
Copilot in GitHub Support, a GPT based large language model assistant
Applied RAG patterns to thousands of GitHub Docs articles to ground AI in real product knowledge using Python
Intelligent Search with Natural Language Processing
Increased click-through-rate by ±30% on relevant articles, preventing over-reliance on hallucinated AI answers

Truefullstaq

Azure DevOps Engineer

Jan 2022 – Sep 2022 · 8 mos

Developing and delivering cloud-native Kubernetes environments for infrastructure use-cases
Azure Engineering with a focus on DevOps for De Nederlandsche Bank (central bank of The Netherlands) in a highly-regulated setting

KubernetesAzure EngineeringCloud Engineering

Microsoft

2 roles

Customer Engineer

Jan 2021 – Jan 2022 · 1 yr · Nederland

Collaborated with 50+ customers to build cloud-native Azure solutions by using a deeply technical and hands-on approach
Wrote TypeScript, C# code to bring enterprise customers towards cloud-native solutions on Azure
Assessed and improved dozens of enterprise customer workloads running on Azure to ensure well-architected solutions

TypeScriptC#Cloud Solutions

Cloud Solutions Architect

Sep 2019 – Sep 2020 · 1 yr · Nederland

Lead software engineer on the Brainy project: a Microsoft Teams chatbot for cross-team task allocation used within Microsoft Netherlands. Used to allocate hundreds of tasks between Cloud Solution Architects.
Cooperated with several international enterprises to develop proof of concepts leveraging Azure services using languages such as TypeScript and C#

TypeScriptC#Cloud Solutions Architecture