Head of Data.
Building systems
& leading teams.
I'm Ian, Head of Data from Amsterdam. I lead the data team I built up to four engineers, and still build the systems myself: taking a messy, real-world problem, turning it into something buildable, and running what ships. 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. 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 data systems that keep working.
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. 8 distributed servers run as the standing production infrastructure.
Client & Stakeholder Work
End-to-end ownership from method to shipped API: a 13-server Connectivity Score build at KR&A and client stakeholders from pension funds to statistics bureaus.
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 the data team (built up to four engineers) through a transformation of the product offering, serving pension funds, real estate investors and national statistical offices.
- 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: methodology reviews with Eurostat and CBS statisticians, presentations to portfolio managers and senior stakeholders.
- Drive AI adoption: OCR and LLM document extraction, agentic pipeline monitoring.
- Self-directed research programme: two working papers and a method paper in preparation (see Research), each backed by an open, reproducible pipeline.
- Technical lead for two multi-year projects, including a hedonic house-price-index study for Eurostat, published as an official Eurostat statistical working paper: led the technical side for eight people across a two-organisation consortium, from scraping and storage to regressions and interpretation.
- 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); 97% accuracy in risk classification.
- Improved the spatial API's response times tenfold through geospatial query optimisation, 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