Data architecture leadership for growing companies.
I'm a fractional data architect for startups and scaleups. Senior architecture leadership without the full-time hire, embedded with your team for as long as you need senior weight in the room, no longer.
Background in software engineering, ten-plus years in data engineering and architecture. I sit at the intersection of architecture, hands-on delivery, and organisational dynamics, which is a long way of saying I draw the system, build it with your team, and keep things sane between data, product and ops while we do it.
I don't do PowerPoint-architecture. I don't subcontract the keyboard to a junior. And I don't pretend I'm the right fit if I'm not. First call is for figuring that out, not for selling.
What's actually different
six months in.
Growth instead of blocking it.
Architecture that scales with your business, not against it. The data infrastructure stops being the thing the rest of the team works around.
Teams ship faster, with fewer fires.
Pipelines that hold, clear ownership, incident-proof ways of working. Engineers spend their week shipping, not fighting yesterday's outage.
Cloud costs come under control.
Spend made visible, then designed against. 30–40% reductions are normal when nobody has looked closely in a few years.
Data, product and ops actually align.
Clear priorities. Fewer 'who owns this' debates. A single roadmap your teams can read and disagree with productively.
Technical debt stops compounding.
A path from constant maintenance to sustainable delivery. The platform is something you keep building on, not something you survive.
"Two to four clients at a time. That's intentional."
Ten years of building the thing, then the team behind it.
The named-client list: Cerba Research, Port of Antwerp-Bruges, Easyfairs, Big Industries (Bridgestone, Nike), Foodpairing. The rest is on LinkedIn.
Cerba Research · Senior Data Architect
Three strategic initiatives under GxP regulation: an enterprise lakehouse, a governed Data Hub, and a client-portal rebuild. Replaced fragmented legacy reporting with auditable data the teams can share without compliance risk. Freelance, Ghent.
Port of Antwerp-Bruges · Lead Data Engineer & Architect
Led the team building Europe's second-largest port's next-gen data platform and matured an ML-ops practice, migrating ~150 on-prem SQL Server artefacts off a fragile legacy estate and ending the constant pipeline firefighting. Freelance, Antwerp.
Easyfairs · Tech Lead Data Engineering
Bootstrapped their Google Cloud data platform and led 6+ engineers and BI developers, opening self-serve BI across every vertical on a single source of truth. Freelance, Brussels.
Big Industries, Foodpairing, and kitchens before
Big-data builds for Bridgestone and Nike at Big Industries; Python and pipelines at Foodpairing; software engineering before data, and a decade in Michelin-star kitchens before any of it.
If two of those outcomes landed, let's have the call.
No pitch. An honest conversation about whether I can help, and what shape it would take if I can.