About me
Short bio
I started in physics: an MSc in Applied Physics at EPFL, then a PhD at ETH Zürich measuring how electrons leave matter on attosecond timescales. The lab taught me one habit I still rely on every day: a measurement is not a result until you have ruled out that you are measuring your own apparatus.
At eBay I brought that habit to business data over eight years and four roles, from analyst to senior data scientist. Five of those years were in the global growth marketing organisation, working on experimentation, attribution, incrementality and personalisation. Later I moved to LLM evaluation, retrieval and agentic search, including a conversational shopping assistant built for production.
Today I'm exploring my next long-term role, and alongside my search I offer my data and AI expertise through my consultancy, Kasmi Data & AI. I work from Zürich, in English, French and German.
- 2018 to 2026eBay
Data Analyst, Data Scientist, Data Scientist II, Senior Data Scientist
- PhDETH Zürich
Ultrafast laser physics: attosecond photoemission and molecular relaxation dynamics
- MScEPFL
Applied Physics
For hiring teams
Roles I'm open to
I'm open to senior and principal roles where rigorous measurement or search and LLM systems sit close to the product.
- RolesSenior / Principal Applied Scientist, Senior Data Scientist, ML Scientist
- Strongest inExperimentation and causal measurement · search and retrieval · LLM evaluation and agentic systems · personalisation
- What I bringI've taken projects from the first question to production at eBay scale, with rigorous measurement, monitoring and quality checks along the way.
- LocationZürich, on site or hybrid; remote or hybrid for teams elsewhere
Topics I'm exploring
What I'm thinking about at the moment
Physics intuition for learning dynamics
Whether ideas from ultrafast spectroscopy, such as relaxation timescales and symmetry breaking, can describe how neural networks learn and when new capabilities appear.
Evaluating AI output
What a trustworthy evaluation of LLM and agent systems actually requires, which parts are genuinely hard, and which are theatre.
Hybrid retrieval
Combining lexical and dense search with rerankers, and measuring honestly what each stage adds.
Publications
Selected research
Attosecond and ultrafast physics at ETH Zürich: 14 journal articles, cited more than 1,100 times. Full list on Google Scholar.
- Attosecond dynamical Franz-Keldysh effect in polycrystalline diamondScience 353, 916 (2016)
- Attosecond optical-field-enhanced carrier injection into the GaAs conduction bandNature Physics 14, 560 (2018)
- Attosecond screening dynamics mediated by electron localization in transition metalsNature Physics 15, 1145 (2019)
- Effective mass effect in attosecond electron transportOptica 4, 1492 (2017)
- Light-matter interaction at surfaces in the spatiotemporal limit of macroscopic modelsPhysical Review Letters 115, 137401 (2015)
- Femtosecond single-electron pulses generated by two-photon photoemission close to the work functionNew Journal of Physics 17, 033008 (2015)
- Ultrafast relaxation dynamics of the ethylene cation C2H4+Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters 7, 1901 (2016)
PhD thesis: Attosecond band structure effect in photoemission dynamics from solid surfaces, ETH Zürich (2017).
Projects
Code
- Disaster message classifier, from raw data to web appAn ETL pipeline into a database, a multi-label NLP classifier, and a Flask web app that sorts incoming messages into response categories for emergency teams.
- Credit card churn model as a tested Python packageIdentifies the bank customers most likely to churn, with logistic regression and random forest models, SHAP explanations, unit tests, logging and a command-line interface.
- Article recommendations for the IBM Watson Studio communityRank-based recommendations, user-user collaborative filtering and matrix factorisation on real user-article interactions.
- Churn prediction for a music-streaming service with SparkFeature engineering on user session logs and a random forest churn classifier, built with PySpark.