Erich Ess is the son of a Swiss sailor and an American librarian. He studied Computer Science and Pure Mathematics at Purdue University, where he wrote papers on scientific visualization. He then went to work for Northrop Grumman, Verizon, and GreatCall as a software engineer. At Verizon and GreatCall he spent is time building highly scalable, reliable enterprise systems. He is currently the CTO of SimpleRelevance's leading team which is building advanced machine learning algorithms.

Erich has a passion for functional programming languages, distributed computing, and mathematics.