Jacobo Del Valle

I am an AI Research Scientist specializing in Language AI and NLP, currently based in Cologne, Germany, where I work at DeepL focusing on Machine Translation and multilingual LLMs.

My path to NLP was shaped by a mix of engineering and a passion for languages. I originally studied Software Engineering at Universidad Galileo in Guatemala, working as a full-stack web developer along the way. During that time, I took up learning German, which opened a door to the beautiful world of linguistics. This fascination with how human language interacts with technology motivated me to pursue AI/ML full-time.

Before diving into graduate school, I gained industry experience working for several years as a Data Scientist—first in the financial sector handling fraud prevention, and later in ad-tech, where I built my first production NLP classification and recommendation systems. I then moved to Europe to complete my Master’s in Computer Science (with an NLP focus) through the Erasmus Mundus LCT scholarship program at Charles University and Saarland University, during which I also carried out an Applied Scientist internship at Amazon Alexa AI.

I love the challenge of taking advanced language models from research environments and scaling them to solve real-world problems.

My hobbies include photography, playing the guitar, learning new languages, and more!

My CV details more about my journey and so does my LinkedIn profile.