Hi, I’m Thomas Rückstieß, based in Melbourne Australia.

I was born in Munich, Germany and educated in Tübingen and Munich. I hold a Ph.D. in Machine Learning from the Technical University Munich (TUM), with the focus of my thesis at the intersection of Supervised and Reinforcement Learning. My other peer-reviewed publications can be found here.

For the last 12 years, I worked for MongoDB in different roles across Technical Services, Engineering and Research. Most recently I developed a Machine Learning framework to model probability distributions over semi-structured data (such as JSON) based on transformers. You can find out more about it in our preprint on Arxiv and our open source library ORiGAMi.

I finished up at MongoDB in February 2025 and am now taking a break from full time employment to explore, learn and work on personal projects.