Data Lead
Engineering Systems
& Data.
I'm Ian, a data engineer from Amsterdam. Two loves have shaped most of my choices: languages and complex problems. The first has me at five languages and pulled me to Italy for part of my studies. The second became my work: taking a messy, real-world problem and building the system that answers it. Cities are my favourite version of that problem, which is why my research keeps returning to urban dynamics: how neighbourhoods change, when a metro line moves prices, what makes a place reachable.
My skillset: translating stakeholder requirements into sustainable business solutions that work.
Full CV below
Four competences, one constraint: a calibrated pipeline tends to outlast a clever one.
Data Engineering
Building and maintaining pipelines and efficient storage: three years of weekly collection across 8 authenticated sources at 300k records a week, with schema, orchestration and failure handling designed up front.
Analytics & ML
The analysis layer on top: nowcasting on sparse official statistics, a monthly house-price index across 13 EU countries, regressions and hedonic pricing, and simulations such as agent-based gentrification models.
System Architecture
The platform underneath: server instances, PostGIS, distributed Iceberg compute, networking/VPN, APIs and security. 13 different services run as production infrastructure.
Product Ownership
End-to-end ownership from method to shipped API: a 13-server build, client stakeholders from pension funds to statistics bureaus, and a team of 4–5 led at KR&A.
Five years building
production data systems.
5+ years building and leading production data systems (pipelines, forecasting, geospatial) across European markets and academic research.
Download the CV (PDF)Professional Experience
- Lead a team of 4 through a transformation of the product offering, serving pension funds and leading FinTechs.
- Develop, maintain and expand data pipelines (e.g. a weekly scrape of 300k records) and spatial big data products.
- Delivered a global connectivity score: 1TB+ processed across 13 servers into a production API.
- Represent the data function with clients: defending methodology against PhD-level scrutiny, presenting to portfolio managers and senior stakeholders.
- Drive AI adoption: OCR and LLM document extraction, agentic pipeline monitoring, agent-assisted development.
- Self-directed research programme: two working papers and a method paper in preparation (see Research), each backed by an open, reproducible pipeline.
- Project lead for two multi-year projects, including a 3-year hedonic house-price-index project for Eurostat: scraping, storing and managing the data, building the regressions, interpreting results.
- Restructured data infrastructure from legacy systems to Airflow, Iceberg and FastAPI.
- Client-facing throughout, with CBS, Eurostat and pension funds.
- Flood-occurrence prediction from alternative data (BSc-thesis project); 90%+ accuracy in risk classification.
- Improved API efficiency tenfold through spatial optimisations, resulting in promotion.
- Enterprise expense-declaration software (EmberJS, PHP) under CI/CD and testing.
- Maintained a client-facing webapp, working on business logic and styling.
Research Topics
Seed-density-to-IoU calibration of an OSM-Voronoi pipeline; NL/DK references, transfer to BE, applied to Italy's 4,209 CAP polygons.
Controlled 2×3 fine-tuning study (YOLOv3/YOLOv8): US fine-tuning transfers roughly nothing to European streets (+0.001 vs +0.153 mAP in-domain).
Amsterdam · Utrecht · Milan.
Education
Stack
Languages & Soft Skills
Dutch C2 · English C2 · Italian B2/C1 · German B2 · Spanish A2
Multi-year project management · Client & stakeholder communication · Presenting and defending methodology to technical and senior audiences · Dependable