Builder · Translator · Systems Thinker

Yolina
Yordanova

I drop into any domain, understand it fast, and turn ambiguity into something that ships — and I can talk to anyone from rocket engineers to a boardroom while doing it. Heading toward deep tech and product engineering.

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How I work

Three things tend to define how I work. I build fast — I'd rather have a working prototype than a perfect plan, and I ship across wildly different domains without needing to be eased in. I translate — between deep technical work and the people who need it, which is usually where a project actually lives or dies. And I think in systems — I take something fuzzy and ambiguous and turn it into a product with a shape.

Right now I do exactly this across a whole company: scoping the unclear problem, prototyping, iterating, delivering — and turning what I'm learning at the frontier of my master's into things people genuinely use. I can hold a conversation with a rocket engineer and with a CEO in the same afternoon.

Where I'm heading: deep tech and product — product engineering, solutions architecture, the roles where building, translating, and systems-thinking all matter at once. The work below is the evidence. I co-found Clear Ahead Labs and write on Substack.

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The proof

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Experience

AI & Automation, Consulting · Edelman BV 2025 — 2026 · ROTTERDAM
I work across the whole company — every domain, technical and not — as the person who can scope a fuzzy problem, build a prototype fast, and deliver it. I translate what I learn at the frontier of my master's into tools people actually use, and I move between rooms easily: engineers, management, and the colleagues who'll use the thing day to day.
  • Prototype and ship internal tools quickly across very different problems — automation, data workflows, and AI adoption — iterating with the people who'll use them rather than building in a vacuum.
  • Ran a Microsoft 365 license-utilisation audit across the holding group that surfaced significant money being lost — entire premium tiers provisioned with effectively no users, and seats paid for at near-zero adoption — and turned a vague sense of overspend into specific, actionable numbers.
  • Act as the translator between technical capability and business need, which is where most of these projects actually succeed or fail.
Rocketry Team · Student Engineering DEEP TECH · HANDS-ON
Worked alongside a team building rockets — deep-tech, hardware-real engineering. It's where I learned I'm just as comfortable talking to rocket engineers as to company management or non-technical staff, and it's a big part of why deep tech is where I want to be.
Co-founder · Clear Ahead Labs 2025 — NOW
Cognitive-strain inference for knowledge workers. Modern digital work is fragmented — constant context-switching, interruptions, and too little recovery — and the cognitive cost of that stays invisible until it shows up as burnout or degraded output. Clear Ahead Labs is building a privacy-first system that infers cognitive strain from behavioural work-pattern signals and makes it measurable before it becomes a problem. clearaheadlabs.com →
MSc, Data Science & AI · TU Delft → 2026
Specialising in Advanced Machine Learning and Human-Centered AI — the combination of building capable models and making sure they actually work for the people using them.
BSc, Computer Science · University of Twente TWENTE
Computer Science, including a pre-master in Industrial Engineering & Management — the systems-and-operations grounding that shows up directly in the optimisation work I gravitate toward.
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