It is a pleasure to officially announce that Sebastian Nagel joined Common Crawl as Crawl Engineer in April. Sebastian brings to Common Crawl a unique blend of experience, skills, knowledge (and enthusiasm!) to complement his role and the organization.

Sebastian has a PhD in Computational Linguistics and several years of experience as a programmer working in search and data. In addition to hands-on experience maintaining and improving a Nutch-based crawler like that of Common Crawl, Sebastian is a core committer to and current chair of the open-source Apache Nutch project. Sebastian’s knowledge of machine learning techniques and natural language processing components of web crawling will help Common Crawl continually improve on and optimize the crawl process and its results.

With Sebastian on board, we have both the competence and momentum to take Common Crawl to the next level.