Description

Looking for senior technical leadership without a full-time hire? I step into organizations where architecture decisions need to be made, technical direction is unclear, or engineering teams need someone to own the hard problems.

With 18 years of experience across defense (NATO), government (Dutch Ministry of Health), and retail (HEMA), I bring a rare combination of hands-on engineering depth and architectural oversight. I've designed platform migrations, led cross-functional technical teams, and delivered under strict security and compliance requirements.

I've set technical direction across multiple teams, defined engineering standards, and mentored senior engineers - while staying close enough to the work to make grounded architectural decisions. I'm available for fractional and interim engagements in solution architecture, technical due diligence, platform selection, developer experience, and engineering leadership - working best where there's real complexity that needs principal-level thinking, not just execution.

Industry field of expertise

Languages

English
Fluent
Dutch
Native or bilingual

Workplace preferences

Can work on-site

Wassenaar (up to 50km), Amsterdam (up to 10km)

HEMA
Solutions Architect & Tech Lead
E-COMMERCE
December 2021 - Today (4 years and 7 months)
Amsterdam Metropolitan Area, Netherlands
As Solutions Architect and Tech Lead at HEMA, I provided cross-functional technical leadership across 4-5 development teams. I owned solution design from ideation through implementation — translating business requirements into architectural decisions and keeping the broader system landscape coherent across teams.

Key projects included designing the migration away from a legacy order management system that was blocking business growth, architecting RFID inventory integration across 700+ stores under a 10-week deadline, and designing an e-invoicing solution for Belgian regulatory compliance. I served as technical reviewer on RFP processes for a new Order Management System and a Customer Identity & Access Management (CIAM) solution, as well as a CMS platform selection. I also built a UI design system now used across HEMA's ecommerce platform.

In parallel, I served as interim Backend Chapter Lead (Jul 2025 - Jan 2026), establishing the chapter function from scratch — running 1-on-1s with developers and leading hiring for the backend engineering group.
Technical Leadership Solution Architecture
Ministerie van Volksgezondheid, Welzijn en Sport
Senior Software Developer
PUBLIC SECTOR
June 2021 - April 2023 (1 year and 10 months)
At the Dutch Ministry of Health (VWS), I worked as a Senior Fullstack Developer on two COVID-19 public services: the Quarantine Declaration system for high-risk travelers and the Walk-in Vaccination Locator. Both were high-visibility government platforms built under pandemic urgency. My work included building REST APIs in PHP/Laravel, developing React/Next.js frontends, setting up monitoring and alerting with Grafana and Prometheus, and implementing automated deployments on Kubernetes/OpenShift. Security and privacy were explicit concerns given the nature of the data.
Software Engineering
NATO Communications and Information Agency (NCI Agency)
Senior Java Developer
DEFENSE AND MILITARY
August 2018 - December 2021 (3 years and 4 months)
Den Haag, Netherlands
During my second stint at NATO's NCI Agency (2018-2021), I worked across three parallel defense systems: a secure federated tactical chat network (JChat), a distributed friendly force tracking toolset for cross-nation coordination, and a cross-domain information exchange gateway. The work spanned full-stack development, NATO standards implementation (STANAG 4774/4778), security hardening, legacy C++ migration, and SDK architecture. I also authored a technical report on containerization adoption for the NATO Software Tools partnership.
Software Engineering