About

Hi! I’m Paul Simmering, an AI Engineer from Germany.

Work

I’m Lead AI Engineer at Q Agentur für Forschung, a German market research agency. Using agentic AI, natural language processing and data engineering, I build tools and workflows to accelerate market research. My specialty is social media and sentiment analysis at scale. If your organization needs to understand consumer trends, market opportunities or sentiment towards a brand or product, I can help. Whether it’s a report, a dashboard, a data pipeline or an MCP server, I can deliver the insights in a format that fits into your workflow or agent.

Paul Simmering in a blue blazer

Previously, I was Technical Expert GenAI Platforms & Services at LBBW, the state bank of Baden-Württemberg. I was a developer on the GenAI team, building an enterprise-grade LLM chat application equipped with an agentic loop and tools to access internal data via RAG. In addition, I served as an internal consultant for GenAI initiatives.

Between 2018 and mid-2025, I worked in different roles at Q. My projects were for small and large businesses in consumer goods, pharmaceuticals, insurance and other industries. Over seven years, I got to experience the evolution of language understanding from bag-of-words models to transformer models to large language models.

I hold a B.Sc. in Economics from the University of Mannheim and a M.Sc. in Economics from Aalborg University.

Writing & speaking

On my blog, I write about applied machine learning with a mix of technical articles, strategic insights and personal reflections. It’s my practice of learning in public. I also give talks at conferences and write papers on topics related to my work.

Paul Simmering presenting research at a conference

Personal interests

  • Blogs. Check my blogroll for recommendations of technical deep dives, lateral thinkers, and genuine personal reflections.
  • Economics. While I’ve pivoted professionally, I’m still interested in public finance, regional development, pricing strategies and the intersection of sociology, psychology and economics.
  • Practical philosophy. I keep a list of the principles that I find most useful for decision making and contentedness.
  • Parks and gardens, especially Japanese gardens.
  • Board and card games: Euro-style board games, Magic: The Gathering, Poker, Backgammon and other games that involve luck in a single game but are skill-based in the long run. I also like games involving trading and auctions, such as Power Grid and Bohnanza.
  • Video games. My favorites are: EVE Online, Guild Wars, Baldurs Gate 3, Satisfactory.

Paul Simmering in a field of pink grass Paul Simmering visiting a garden Paul Simmering hiking in the woods Paul Simmering pushing a pram on a tree-lined path A completed game of Carcassonne on a table

What I use

I enjoy reading “what I use” lists of others, so here’s mine: What I use. More details about the website itself, including an image generator, can be found in the colophon.

Contact

If you find the topics I mentioned above interesting, I would enjoy hearing from you. The best way to contact me is via email: paul@simmering.dev.