I'm an engineer turned CTO with over a decade across data, machine learning, full-stack engineering and leadership. I've built products and teams at a bank, a global payments company and start-ups, and today I lead engineering at an AI-native fintech.
- 10+
- Years in data & ML
- 3B+
- Live AI/ML model predictions shipped
- 14
- Blog posts
- 5
- Talks & events
About
What I bring to the table
Writing and public speaking
I write The Data Canal, a newsletter on data & AI tooling, architecture and careers, and speak at conferences such as PyData and PyCon DE about building data platforms and AI products.
The pendulum from IC to executive
I went from individual contributor to manager, back to individual contributor, and on to board-level executive. Every swing of that pendulum taught me something the other side could not.
Impact for the world's biggest brands
Machine learning I built and led drives conversion optimisation, fraud prevention and cash optimisation for the world's biggest brands, from payments at Adyen to treasury at Palm.
Writing
Blogs
Lessons learned from building data platforms, shipping machine learning and leading data teams.
The Data Canal
My newsletter with insights into data & AI tooling, architecture and careers in data.
The Agentic future of Data Analytics
How will Data Analytics change with the rise of AI? My view on the most prominent use cases and how it will shape the domain going forward.
Optimising AI with textual feedback: A look at TextGrad and AdalFlow
What if there's a way to optimise for AI model outcomes without changing the underlying model? A deep-dive into optimising model inputs against any measurable metric.
Airflow 3.0: DAG versioning, multi-language support and native AI/ML workflows
The biggest release for Airflow in years is coupled with a few long outstanding quality of life changes. What are those, and how will they improve your day-to-day as an Airflow user?
Structuring data teams: Building an effective data organisation
A well-established data organisation is necessary to harness the full potential of data & AI. What does a successful data organisation look like and what are the factors of success?
Climbing the data career ladder, and descending it again
First-hand experiences from a data professional that climbed to director level and went back to being an individual contributor.
Battle of the LLMs: Picking the right model
With new LLMs being launched every week, how to keep up and judge which one to use?
Earlier writing on Medium
Data Platform
Building a data platform from scratch at Solvimon.
Contextual Bandits
Developing the first live machine learning use case at Adyen.
Embedded Analytics
Choosing the right embedded analytics tool as a SaaS company.
Deploying Airflow
How to deploy Airflow on GCP using Kubernetes.
Deploying Airbyte
How to deploy Airbyte on GCP using Kubernetes.
Speaking
Talks & events
Conference talks, panels and meetups I organised on data infrastructure, machine learning and AI in production.
Incidents for Data Teams: Detection, Ownership & On-Call Realities (Amsterdam Data Union)
Panel discussion on how data teams handle production data failures: detection, on-call and blameless postmortems.
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AI Agents in Production: Real Use Cases, Real Value (Amsterdam)
Meetup I organised with two Amsterdam fintech teams showing production AI systems: bank reconciliation automation and AI-driven forecasting.
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Multi-tenant Conversational Analytics (PyCon DE & PyData 2025)
A deep dive into building secure, scalable conversational analytics for many customers at once.
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Building a Data Platform from scratch (PyData Amsterdam 2024)
Sharing my experience on building a data platform from scratch.
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Building Big Data Infrastructure (Spark + AI Summit 2019)
How the data platform was built and how ML is managed at Adyen.
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Career
Work Experience
From data scientist to engineering lead, across banks, payments, insurance and start-ups.
Palm1 year and 11 monthsRemote
CTO
Jul 2026 - now · 3 months
Amsterdam, Netherlands
We build an AI-native company that is re-imagining the world of enterprise treasury & finance.
VP of Engineering
May 2025 - Jun 2026 · 1 year and 2 months
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Building a next-generation AI-native engineering organisation. We ship continuously, using AI workflows.
Data & AI Lead
Nov 2024 - Apr 2025 · 6 months
Amsterdam, Netherlands
As first data hire, I led building data & AI products through hands-on back-end, data and ML engineering.
Achmea4 monthsApeldoorn, Netherlands
Senior Machine Learning Engineer
Jul 2024 - Oct 2024 · 4 months
Apeldoorn, Netherlands
I've helped shape a next-generation MLOps platform to power the creation and deployment of the latest ML models for insurance pricing.
Solvimon1 yearUtrecht, Netherlands
Founding Engineer
Jul 2023 - Jun 2024 · 1 year
Utrecht, Netherlands
I set-up the data platform and built data products on top of it.
Achievements:
- Built a state of the art data platform from scratch using Airflow, BigQuery, Spark and Airbyte. With continuous deployment using Gitlab CI/CD and infra deployed on Kubernetes.
- Built an embedded analytics and reporting product based on self-service dashboards and reports for usage metering, invoicing and revenue recognition.
- Built back-end data services using Docker, Python, Postgres and FastAPI to power data products, e.g. data imports, data exports, reporting & analytics.
- Built data syncing for CRMs (HubSpot, Salesforce) and other third party integrations (e.g. Email).
Adyen5 yearsAmsterdam, Netherlands
Engineering Lead, Analytics & ML
Jan 2023 - Jun 2023 · 6 months
Amsterdam, Netherlands
I managed multiple teams.
I was responsible for payments analytics and machine learning (30+ FTE). Among others, this included machine learning for fraud detection and the merchant facing insights (dashboards) product. I was the hiring manager for all data science related positions in the company.
Tech Lead Manager, Machine Learning
Jan 2021 - Dec 2022 · 2 years
Amsterdam, Netherlands
I managed and built teams.
During my first year as TLM I built up the machine learning team for conversion optimisation. During my second year, I took on leading the team responsible for fraud detection.
Achievements:
- Managed teams that ranged from 4 to 15 people, taking up people management and technical leadership.
- Expanded the biggest ML use case in Adyen to be scored 3 billion times in the live payments flow. Increasing the revenue gained further by showing significant outperformance (against a control) for all top merchants.
- My team launched the ML solution for determining payment authentication to be a global solution. The solution chooses when to use authentication and which version to use.
- Helped launch and build a first iteration of an experimentation platform with the aim of simplifying product and machine learning experiments.
- Helped launch Automated Risk, the first machine learning based fraud prevention that was built into the RevenueProtect product.
- Hiring manager in 2021 for all Data Science positions in Adyen (over 10 hires in one year). Set-up the interview process (case study, technical interview).
Senior Machine Learning Scientist
Jul 2018 - Dec 2020 · 2 years and 6 months
Amsterdam, Netherlands
I've worked on the first ML in production use cases at Adyen.
Achievements:
- Developed Adyen's first live machine learning model from concept to production. This increased conversion rates across a variety of products, e.g. customer authentication, payment messaging, recovering failed payments. The overall revenue uplift increased by hundreds of millions of euros compared to the baseline, bolstering Adyen's market leading position in terms of revenue / value add.
- Producing product insights by creating ETL pipelines and building data pipeline orchestration. Thereby laying the building blocks of Adyen's Big Data Platform.
- Helped create and launch a data science based solution to rescue subscription based payments (AutoRescue). At inception it rescued hundreds of thousand euros on a monthly basis.
ING2 years and 1 monthAmsterdam, Netherlands
Data Scientist
Jun 2016 - Jun 2018 · 2 years and 1 month
Amsterdam, Netherlands
I've worked on the roll-out and validation of machine learning models.
Achievements:
- Model risk evaluation and model validation of interest rate, deposits and prepayment asset and liability management models.
- Roll-out of new rate sensitive deposits model (Volume of Savings, VOS) across all ING locations.
- Scenario analysis of convexity risk in savings and mortgage portfolio for interest rate risk to use in capital calculations.
Toolbox
Technologies
The tools I reach for most often.