Meet the team
This is the team behind openrouteservice - a colourful mixture of forward thinking minds from different domains
Openrouteservice is maintained by Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology (HeiGIT) group and is supported by the Klaus Tschira Foundation (KTS) Heidelberg. It is part of the GIScience Research Group at the Department of Geography, within the University of Heidelberg. Its objective is to facilitate the transfer of knowledge and technology from academia to practical applications and professional services. The focus lies on the analysis, refinement, enrichment and usage of big spatial data from the crowd for innovative applications and services.

Adam Rousell
DevOps Engineer
As an organizational talent, adam handles everything from meeting organization over project planning to overseeing pull requests and taking care of our servers. He would like to actually implement features but his wish is often denied due to all his other responsibilities.

Andrzej Oleś
Core Engineer
Andrzej studied computer science and earned his PhD in theoretical physics. Today he is working with us especially on graph algorithms to make openrouteservice find your optimal route in an even shorter amount of time. By the way, he is also a pretty experienced R developer – not many of them are around here in Heidelberg!

Alexander Zipf
Visionary
Alexander is chair of GIScience (Geoinformatics) at the University of Heidelberg. He started openrouteservice back in 2008 and promised to keep innovative services running until the present day.

Amandus Butzer
Web Engineer
Most of the time Amandus is implementing new features and fixing bugs on any of our websites. Apart from making our Apps more user friendly he is the fastest forum responder in the west and manages the ors user accounts.

Julian Psotta
Core Engineer
Julian loves test driven development and implements handy new features to the openrouteservice core. Feel free to contact him if you have any great ideas, he will love to hear from you!

Sascha Fendrich
Core Engineer
Sascha is looking into the future envisioning solutions for long-term maintainability. Due to his mathematical background he is also an excellent consultant with respect to the complex routing algorithms we implement for openrouteservice.

Takara Baumbach
Core Engineer
Takara not only loves instruments. He speaks Java fluently and takes care of new and fancy features in the openrouteservice API.

Jakob Schnell
Core Engineer
If you let him, Jakob will talk about graph theory and network analyses all day long. He single-handedly implemented the new internal centrality endpoint to openrouteservice, is maintainer of the QGIS SDK and in general works on the backend side of things.

Emma Hegarty
Research Assistant
Emma is a research assistant supporting the openrouteservice team in the further development of the website and the web client. Her tasks primarily deal with software development using web frameworks.

Jakob Stolze
Research Assistant
Jakob is helping us out with our main Website, improving user workflows and scripting custom extensions for WordPress. He really loves PHP!
Former team members
Although they already moved on, these fine people contributed a lot to ORS and have more than earned their place here.

Timothy Ellersiek
DevOps Engineer
Timothy was taking care of the infrastructure behind the openrouteservice api and dealt with challenges in regards to scalability of the service, automated deployment and generally ensured reliability of the service. He had solutions up his sleeve for all kind of problems and is sincerely missed.

Maxim Rylov
Core Engineer
Maxim is the original author of openrouteservice and built the whole thing from scratch. Apart from his experience with graph theory and algorithms his cartography skills are reflected in the openmapsurfer.NET framework he created.

Nils Nolde
Python Engineer
Nils comes from the domain of Geophysics but luckily enough enjoys working with anything within the spatial domain. He used to work for Zalando in the field of logistics and brought quite some wisdom to the team of openrouteservice. By the way, he is also the author of the notorious ORStools QGIS plugin!

Isabell Klipper
Python Engineer
All of our python showcases were taken care by Isabell. The stories come from our users while she was the engineer making precious jupyter notebooks out of them!

Tahira Ullah
Python Engineer
With profound Python and PostGIS skills Tahira studied new datasets to incorporate into the openrouteservice ecosystem.

Athanasios Kogios
Core Engineer
Thanasis came to GIS from the physics realm as well and was enhancing our core algorithms with new features. He likes to do object oriented programming all day – every day – and is a simulation enthusiast.

Amon Santana
Web Engineer
Amon is one of those polyglots in the world of web development. Take your pick: single page applications, php frameworks or even web design, he’ll get any of it done in time. And in quality. We were happy to have him as part of the team, and we are sure that he will stay an active member of the community.

Hendrik Leuschner
Core Engineer
Hendrik comes from the domain of physics and has profound knowledge and experience in developing spatial algorithms and application programming interfaces. His speciality is making these scalable and performant for large datasets.

Sabrina Marx
DevOps Engineer
Sabrina is genuinely fascinated by docker and containerized setups and was helping us to make the openrouteservice infrastructure stable and scalable.