Jilles van Gurp

Jilles van Gurp photo

CTO@Formation, consultant, Berlin Germany

Experienced tech entrepreneur, (interim) CTO, strategy, and product consultant, hands-on troubleshooter and mentor.

  • Entrepreneurship
  • Geospatial technologies
  • Search Engines / ElasticSearch
  • Leading Remote Teams
  • Agile Team Management
  • Technical consulting
  • Team Workshops / Troubleshooting
  • Server-side cloud architectures

About Jilles

Dr. Jilles van Gurp is the CTO, of FORMATION Gmbh in Berlin where he drives the product and technology roadmap. Jilles is a serial founder, troubleshooter, and has decades of experience building innovative software services, leading tech teams, and creating breakthrough products. His professional experience includes Senior Researcher at Nokia Research in Finland, Principal Engineer at Nokia Maps in Berlin. He also is a Search Engine consultant that has worked with clients such as BCG DV, Soundcloud, Bertelsmann Group and others with their search challenges, product development, and roadmap.

Skills

  • Natural team player, with strong interpersonal skills, can build and lead agile teams, coach and mentor individuals at all professional levels and from a wide variety of backgrounds.
  • Loves to figure out technical roadmaps and tackle the difficult strategic questions with a focus on pragmatic early releases to achieve long-term strategic value.
  • Deep technical expertise and mindset, with hands-on approach to dealing with new domains, tech stacks and paradigms.
  • Pragmatic problem solver and fan of lateral-&-end to end thinking, love to iterate!

Jilles holds a PhD in Software Engineering from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands (2003) where he also worked as a postdoc, a Swedish Licentiate degree from the Blekinge Institute of Technology (2001), and a master degree from the University of Utrecht 1999.

Available For

  • High-level or hands-on consulting on search architecture & Elasticsearch
  • Trainings and workshops related to that. Want to use Fleet, ELK, or are you looking to level up your search skills? I can help.
  • Architecture reviews, workshops, or hands-on deep dives
  • Team troubleshooting & interim management & mentoring.
  • General consulting on tech, roadmap, or product.

I charge a day rate for my services. I’m not available to join your team full time.

Contact

  • Email: jilles AT jillesvangurp.com
  • Cellphone: +49-176-6189-5701. I’m also on WhatsApp and Signal.
  • Address Bergstrasse 16, 10115 Berlin, Germany
  • Linkedin
  • Github
  • Twitter
  • Mastodon
  • Generally @jillesvangurp on anything I use. That handle, like my name, is globally unique.

This Web Site

On this web-site you may find an archive of my blog (including some recent efforts) and PDFs of my published work from my academic career.

Privacy & Cookies

This site currently has no cookies that need setting, I don’t use any analytics, and I’m not interested in invading your privacy. Current browsers are making tracking quite hard in any case. Also, I actually enjoy using such browsers myself for this reason. The web hosting that I use may collect some server logs of course. Beyond that, I’m not aware of any kind of tracking or privacy invading tools on this website.

If you are looking for a privacy policy, you just read it. If you enjoy the content, reach out on e.g. Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.