Beschikbaar voor nieuwe opdrachten
Beschikbaar vanaf 2026-06-01not recently updated
Freelance specialist · IT
Freelance Staff Data Platform Engineer
Most recently leading the build of a greenfield enterprise data platform for a global industrial-products wholesaler.
- Locatie
- Amsterdam
- Jaren werkervaring
- 25
- Indicatie uurtarief
- €145
- Werkwijze
- Flexibel (in overleg)
Briefly discuss whether this fits your needs — no obligation.
Waarvoor in te huren
Most recently leading the build of a greenfield enterprise data platform for a global industrial-products wholesaler. Six-person team, medallion architecture on Databricks + Unity Catalog, dbt orchestrated via Airflow/Cosmos on Kubernetes, Terraform and GitLab CI throughout, Grafana for observability — replacing a legacy AWS (Glue, S3, Aurora) stack via a smooth migration path. As the most senior engineer on the team I own the hard parts: codifying Unity Catalog schemas and fine-grained permissions, reverse-engineering Microsoft Fabric APIs to make Power BI ↔ Databricks provisioning a one-command operation, and stepping in as de facto DBA on heavy PostgreSQL tuning for frontend workloads. I introduced agent-assisted development to the team with a hardened, sandboxed setup and version-controlled agent configs, applied to data-quality, ops, infra refactors and documentation. Mentored senior and medior engineers across the platform team and downstream consumers.
Typische opdrachten & sterke punten
- 20+ years building production data platforms — Booking, Just Eat Takeaway, Seenons, Brenntag
- Co-founded Booking.com's Hadoop initiative — multi-petabyte clusters, billions of events daily
- Hired and led 20+ engineers at Just Eat Takeaway, up to 12 direct reports
- Stood up a production Snowflake + dbt platform in under 2 months at Seenons
- Early professional adopter of agent-assisted development — hardened, reviewable, in production teams
Voorkeur voor projecten
- Looking for Staff / Lead Data Platform Engineer engagements where I can push real innovation into production — data platforms end-to-end (Databricks + Unity Catalog, Snowflake, dbt, Airflow), cloud infrastructure as code (Terraform, Pulumi on AWS/Azure), and the surrounding ops layer (Grafana, GitLab/GitHub CI, Kubernetes).
- Equally interested in AI-tooling and agent-assisted engineering inside professional settings — hardened sandboxed setups, version-controlled agent configs, reviewable workflows — applied to data quality, infra refactors, internal tooling, and documentation.
- Best fit: scale-ups and enterprises building a modern data platform from scratch or migrating off a legacy stack. Comfortable as the most senior engineer on a small team, owning hard problems end-to-end and mentoring senior/medior engineers. Hybrid in NL (Amsterdam based) or remote across EU.
Samenwerking & planning
- Werkwijze: Flexibel (in overleg)
- Beschikbaar · Beschikbaar vanaf June 2026
Sector & context
Industrial distribution / B2B wholesale — currently consulting at Brenntag, global industrial-products distributor. Circular economy & sustainability — Lead Platform & Data Engineer at Seenons, a Dutch waste-to-value scale-up. Food delivery & marketplaces — Senior Manager, Data Tools & Data Engineering at Just Eat Takeaway, through the JE/Takeaway merger and follow-on acquisitions (10,000+ Tableau users). Online travel & e-commerce at hyper-scale — eight years at Booking, including the founding of the Hadoop initiative. Also a Big Data / A/B testing consultant across France, NL, Germany.
Stack, domein & tools
Soft skills & werkwijze
Team building & hiring — 20+ engineers hired at Just Eat Takeaway across the tenure; built and led teams of up to 12 direct reports. Mentoring — deliberate and ongoing across every role: senior and medior engineers on the platform team and in downstream consuming teams, through code reviews, design discussions, and pairing on hard problems. Clean handovers — trained app teams to own what I built (PostgreSQL tuning runbooks at Brenntag, interns running the Seenons platform independently). Cross-discipline communication — comfortable from kernel-level engineering through to non-technical stakeholders; reshaped Booking's internal tech-talks format (still in use after my tenure). Calm under pressure — established 24/7 on-call culture at JET; production debugging at petabyte scale at Booking.
Persoonlijk profiel
I'm not your ordinary data engineer. Twenty years across travel, food delivery, circular economy, industrial distribution, through mergers, expansion, green fields and legacy struggles, I think I've done as much as you can imagine and always delivered. What I bring is range. Wide and deep. Need a misbehaving DNS resolver fixed, disk buffers retuned on a hot Postgres box, a CSS rule that finally lays out right, or a data-quality bug nobody else can reproduce? I can, and I will, and it'll work. It always does. Imagination, small sharp tools, going a layer deeper than the brief asks for. The systems I build hold up under load. The teams I build outlast me. The handovers are clean. I work best where the scope is open and the problems are real.
Knowledge & skills
No Skills CV created yet
Rates
Availability
Available
From June 2026