I led development and release of Branded Shelves, an advertising product at bol.com, helping turn a product concept into a delivered capability inside a large e-commerce environment.
About
Twenty years in software engineering, with a focus on systems that need to scale, integrate, and stay economically sensible.
Today I help companies reduce infrastructure and operational costs, automate business processes, modernise legacy architectures, improve reliability, and apply AI where it can create practical value in real workflows.
I am a senior software engineer moving further into freelance consulting while continuing to build SaaS products of my own. My background is in backend engineering, system design, architecture, and high-load distributed systems, with most recent experience as a Lead Engineer at bol.com serving large-scale retail in the Netherlands and Belgium.
The work I do today is explicitly business-impact oriented. I help companies lower infrastructure and operational costs, automate internal workflows, integrate difficult systems, and modernise platforms that have become expensive or slow to change. Where AI is useful, I focus on practical application inside real business processes rather than speculative experimentation.
Over time I grew from implementation-heavy backend work into broader technical leadership. That progression came from repeatedly working on systems where reliability, scale, and organisational complexity mattered as much as code quality. I tend to be most useful when the problem sits between engineering depth and business constraint.
What I help companies achieve
Lower cloud and infrastructure spend where systems have grown inefficient.
Automate manual or fragmented workflows, including with tools such as n8n where appropriate.
Modernise legacy architectures without creating unnecessary delivery risk.
Improve scalability, reliability, and operability in systems under real load.
Introduce AI into workflows in ways that are measurable, maintainable, and useful.
Career narrative
From critical backend systems to lead-level responsibility in complex platforms.
Earlier in my career, I worked on systems where correctness and integration discipline were essential, including payment-related platforms with Mastercard integrations. I also built software around investment ratings and ESG-related data processing, which strengthened my preference for precision, traceability, and dependable data flows.
Later, my work expanded into logistics, finance, retail platforms, and cloud migration. That included integrating the REFLEX warehouse logistics system into a broader internal service ecosystem, and building financial and vendor systems that supported automated invoicing and bookkeeping.
At bol.com, I worked on large-scale distributed systems in an environment where technical decisions had direct customer and operational impact. My most recent role was Lead Engineer, where I combined hands-on implementation with architecture and technical decision-making across teams and domains.
That work reinforced a pattern I had already seen for years: strong engineering matters most when it improves cost, reliability, delivery speed, and business flexibility at the same time.
Selected highlights
Impact delivered through collaborative engineering work.
I co-architected and implemented a central translation system that enabled a more consistent multilingual retail experience across the platform.
As an expert engineer, I played a key role in a two-year CMS migration for webshop and apps, contributing to technical direction as well as implementation in a long-running, cross-team transformation.
I worked on migrations from on-premise and big-data-heavy environments to cloud-based setups that reduced operational burden and infrastructure cost while improving flexibility.
How I work
Pragmatic, business-driven, and careful about unnecessary complexity.
I prefer simple solutions over elaborate ones, but not simplistic ones. The goal is to make systems easier to operate, cheaper to run, and safer to change. That usually means working from real constraints: team capacity, delivery pressure, technical debt, existing contracts, and business priorities.
I am comfortable working at architecture level, but I stay close to implementation. That keeps decisions grounded and makes it easier to move from analysis to delivery without losing momentum.
Current focus
Freelance consulting for engineering, architecture, and operational efficiency.
Workflow automation, including with tools such as n8n when they fit the problem.
AI-assisted systems and AI transformation grounded in real use cases.
Building focused SaaS products informed by practical engineering and product work.
Work together
If you need senior technical depth with a clear view of business impact, I am open to selective consulting work.
The best starting point is a short note describing the system, the current bottleneck, and what outcome matters most.
Get in touch