Chris Zevenbergen

Work

• Building

  Agents with tools, retrieval over your own documents, evaluation, and the backend that carries it. Models from an API or self-hosted on your own servers. I work in your team and in your codebase.

  Agents · Retrieval · Evaluation · Backends · Python · TypeScript · C#

• Advice

  Which model, and whether to host it yourself. Where the data goes. What an agent may decide on its own. What to build first, and what to leave out.

  Model choice · Self-hosting · Data · Scope

• Teaching

  Workshops for engineering teams: building with language models and agents, and coding with AI.

  Language models · Agents · AI-assisted coding

Career

1. 2024 to now

   Software and AI engineering, as Propodeum

   Since October 2024 I have worked independently. At first that was mostly software engineering, in energy and healthcare: backend systems, platform work and the infrastructure beneath them. In 2025 the focus moved to agentic AI: systems in which language models plan, use tools and carry out tasks, built into software that already exists. I have built such systems in sectors such as cyber security, legal and energy, and given workshops on agentic AI and on coding with AI.

2. 2019 to 2024

   Consultancies

   Before that I worked through the consultancies Alten, Navara and Bloom Group, placed with one client for a year or two at a time. At Shell I worked on simulation software for oil and gas fields. At Homerr, a logistics start-up later acquired by Vinted, parcel volume tripled while I was there. As technical lead I moved its platform to event-driven services. At Alliander I worked on planning software that schedules people, materials and vehicles.

3. Alongside

   Open source and products

   I wrote Nanitics, an open source SDK for building agentic AI systems. I also build and run FAQ Plus: a chat page that answers customer questions from a business's own documents, and sends the business the questions it cannot answer.

   NaniticsFAQ Plus

4. Until 2019

   TU Delft

   I studied Mechanical Engineering for my bachelor's and Systems and Control for my master's. My thesis, on controllers that divide power between the energy sources in a microgrid, was published by IEEE.

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