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!

Tasja Geschwendtas

Tasja Geschwendtas

Research Assistant

When it comes to management of user accounts, Tasja is the one for the job. She is supporting us by verifying use cases for the collaborative plan and helps out with communication tasks.

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.

thanasis

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.