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Summary
Engineering leader with 25 years of experience across software development, data infrastructure, and organizational leadership. Spent the last decade scaling data platforms and teams at companies like Booking.com and Swiss Re. Now running Geminus, a data platform consulting practice.
Experience
Founder & Principal Consultant
Geminus | Jan 2025 – Present | Minneapolis (Remote)
Data platform consulting practice helping companies optimize infrastructure, fix pipeline issues, and migrate to modern architectures.
- Delivered engagements across UK, Netherlands, and Germany: data collection infrastructure, pipeline optimization, data migration
- Built scalable data collection system for UK tech company enabling market intelligence capabilities
- Diagnosed and resolved critical pipeline failures for European fintech, restoring production reliability
- Designed migration strategy for German enterprise with comprehensive validation framework ensuring data integrity
iptiQ (Swiss Re) | Jun 2021 – Dec 2024 | Amsterdam (Remote)
Led data platform engineering at Swiss Re’s InsurTech subsidiary, scaling team from 4 to 20.
- Reduced critical pipeline runtime 96% (9h → 20min) architecting lakehouse migration (S3, Athena, Glue, dbt, Airflow)
- Scaled data team 4→20 as core technical interviewer, designing structured hiring framework
- Owned 3 business-critical domains managing 6+ engineers and 6-7 senior stakeholder relationships
- Designed cost-efficient architecture (serverless Athena vs Snowflake), 10x cheaper while maintaining performance
- Transformed engineering culture: code reviews, shared Python libraries, 12-week mentorship program
- Reduced incidents ~80% through proactive monitoring, data contracts, and stakeholder communication
Tech: AWS (S3, Athena, Glue, RDS, ECS, MWAA), Python, SQL, dbt, Airflow, Terraform
Core Developer - Data Engineering
Booking.com | Dec 2018 – Jun 2021 | Amsterdam
Data engineer on marketing platforms supporting ~$12B annual ad spend.
- Operated petabyte-scale PPC pipelines (~1 PB/day) on 16-node bare-metal cluster, 99%+ SLA
- Maintained 200+ production Perl pipelines with strict 9-hour processing windows
- Built Kubernetes-native pipelines feeding Markov chain multi-touch attribution (trillions of events)
- Migrated ephemeral outputs to BigQuery, improving data access for analytics teams
- On-call “fort-holder” every 6 weeks, triaging critical failures affecting multi-million-euro decisions
Tech: Hadoop, BigQuery, Kafka, Kubernetes, Perl, Python
Senior Software Engineer → Team Lead (Machine Learning)
Talpa Network / Emesa | Sep 2016 – Dec 2018 | Amsterdam
Led ML engineering at vakantieveilingen.nl, one of Netherlands’ largest online auction platforms.
- Productionized auction pricing system processing ~800M auctions/month
- Built real-time prediction system serving ~300 auctions/sec (online regression, vanilla Python)
- Led two ML teams (auction optimization, recommendation engine), establishing ML engineering practices
- Founded Python guild (~10-15 engineers), creating shared libraries and coding standards
- Bridged data science and business, translating “profit per minute” into production systems
Tech: Python, Kafka, Avro, MySQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, Docker
Senior Software Engineer & Team Lead
Grupo RBS | Dec 2014 – Jul 2016 | Porto Alegre, Brazil
Led technical redesign of CMS at major Brazilian media company (8 newspapers, 2 TV channels, 8 radio stations).
- Reduced content publishing time from hours to minutes with microservices architecture
- Technical lead for ~6 engineers, guiding architecture and mentoring on service-oriented design
- Built weather data platform aggregating international + local Brazilian sources
- Introduced caching layers (Varnish, Redis) improving editorial workflow performance
Tech: Java, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, MongoDB, Oracle, Docker, Redis
Founder & Technical Director
Fleye | Feb 2006 – Aug 2014 | Porto Alegre, Brazil
Founded and led bootstrapped software company for 8+ years.
- Built engineering team from zero, 50/50 hands-on development and leadership
- Delivered multiple production products across Java, Python, PHP, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB
- Created engineering culture that outlived the company—team members later founded their own company together
- Evolved leadership approach from high-pressure to encouragement-based, transforming team performance
Skills
Data: Data Engineering, Data Pipelines, Data Architecture, Data Migration, ETL/ELT, Data Quality
Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS (S3, Athena, Glue, RDS, ECS, MWAA), Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker
Languages & Tools: Python, SQL, dbt, Apache Airflow, Kafka, BigQuery, PostgreSQL
Leadership: Team Building, Technical Hiring, Stakeholder Management, Mentorship, Cross-functional Collaboration
Location
Based in Minneapolis, MN. US work authorization. Open to remote and hybrid opportunities.