A global citizen based in Belgium.
I'm a senior software engineer who builds AI systems for production. Twenty years of engineering experience, now applied to AI agent orchestration and retrieval-augmented generation.
I'm a senior software engineer who builds AI systems for production. Twenty years of engineering experience, now applied to AI agent orchestration and retrieval-augmented generation.
I started writing code professionally at KULeuven in 2006, working as a software developer and system administrator. After that I moved to Vancouver to work as a software engineer at SignalQ, a Canadian telecom. I came back to Belgium in 2015 to work at a couple of startups (Les Etalages, Social Seeder), getting my hands on the messy parts of building software products. In 2016 I joined Wolters Kluwer as a senior engineer, then moved to Napoleon Sports & Casino in 2019, eventually leading the technical team. In 2025 I joined Cuez as an AI & Software Engineer.
I've kept Protoku running alongside my main roles since I founded it in 2018. It's where I do my own work, my experiments, and where my AI engineering practice has grown.
My interest in AI goes back to 2017, when I completed Udacity's Artificial Intelligence Nanodegree. Today, that work has evolved into a focus on production RAG systems and AI agent orchestration. Around the same time I organized the PHPLimburg meetup (2018–2020).
For the past year, I've been deep in production AI engineering.
Most recently, I contributed agents and orchestration work to the Google + BBC AI Agents demo at IBC2025, winner of the Broadcast Tech Innovation Award.
That work made something obvious: a lot of practical RAG and agent engineering knowledge is locked inside private codebases, demos, and production incidents. Very little of it is written down clearly for working engineers.
So I'm writing it down. Retrieval-Augmented Generation: An Engineer's Guide to Building RAG Systems with Your Own Data is currently in progress on Leanpub. I also write at herczeg.be/blog about the gap between AI demos and production systems.
I travel a lot with my wife. We've lived for stretches in Vancouver, Los Angeles, Japan, New Zealand, and Austria, with shorter trips in between. When I'm not on a plane, I'm training for a marathon or playing competitive tennis.
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Jeroen Herczeg is a senior software engineer based in Belgium who builds AI systems for production. He has 20 years of engineering experience across software platforms, distributed systems, microservices, Kubernetes, and AI engineering.
Most recently, he contributed agents and orchestration work to the Google + BBC AI Agents demo at IBC2025, winner of the Broadcast Tech Innovation Award. His work focuses on retrieval-augmented generation, AI agent orchestration, and the engineering gap between impressive AI demos and systems that actually work in production.
He is the author of Retrieval-Augmented Generation: An Engineer's Guide to Building RAG Systems with Your Own Data, currently in progress on Leanpub. He writes about practical AI engineering at herczeg.be/blog and speaks about production AI, RAG, and agent systems when the topic fits.
Jeroen lives in Belgium, travels often with his wife, and plays tennis badly enough to stay humble.