Marius van Niekerk
Data platform architect
About
Principal architect focused on platform modernization, real-time systems, and data/AI infrastructure. Over the course of my career, I have evolved from hands-on statistical and data science work into cross-cutting technical leadership, defining architecture, standards, and migration paths that improve reliability, developer velocity, and long-term maintainability.
Work Experience
InMarket
remote
An ad-tech company focusing on location-specific mobile delivery
April 2025 – Present
Principal Systems Architect
Principal tech leadership focused on reducing engineering cycle times
Highlights
- Modernized legacy ad-tech platforms and defined practical migration paths from older application architectures to service-oriented Go systems.
- Shaped the architecture of real-time delivery and decisioning platforms across services, shared libraries, infrastructure, deployment, and analytics integration.
- Established engineering patterns for internal AI and ML platforms so new capabilities could move from experimentation into repeatable production systems.
- Raised engineering leverage through stronger observability, safer automation, better CI/test architecture, and reusable platform standards.
- Led the Claude Code initiative on how to deploy AI at InMarket
Voltron Data
remote
A next-generation data system startup focused on GPU-accelerated data processing
August 2021 – April 2025
Senior Staff Software Engineer
Tech Lead building and architecting tools and services to support the Theseus compute engine.
Highlights
- Architected and owned the set of client-facing gRPC services that surround the GPU-accelerated Theseus compute engine
- Developed a custom Kubernetes Operator that manages the lifecycle of GPU accelerated compute jobs
- Build out benchmarking and performance testing infrastructure for the Theseus compute engine
Flatiron Health
New York, NY
An Oncology Health-Tech company
March 2017 – August 2021
Staff Software Engineer
Build, design and maintain tools and architecture to aid in the processing of electronic health record based datasets.
Highlights
- Architect for the core platform organization (40+ engineers)
- Migrated a large legacy ETL framework written in bash to a modern python equivalent using dask whilst maintaining full backwards compatibility
- Deployed Snowflake at enterprise scale
- Developed a simple S3-based data catalog system for archival datasets with atomicity guarantees and versioning
- Migrated petabytes of datasets from csv to parquet
Maxpoint Interactive
Raleigh, NC
Ad-tech focusing on geospatial targeting
April 2016 – February 2017
Senior Computational Engineer
Worked as a tool builder and facilitator between the data science team and the data engineering team.
Particular focus was on scaling solutions to work on massive datasets (10 billion+ rows).
Lots of big data work using hive, impala, spark, and MapReduce.
Highlights
- A cross-language framework for building data pipelines using Apache Spark. This allows data scientists to to write code in python and easily move it to a production process written in Scala.
- Large scale geo-spatial analysis model that performs matching between billions of GPS points and millions of addresses with Apache Spark to effectively compute approximations of home locations from observations of noisy GPS data.
Maxpoint Interactive
Raleigh, NC
Ad-tech focusing on geospatial targeting
April 2012 – April 2016
Senior Data Scientist
Primary support for a team of 23 data scientists, 17 engineers and 21 analysts for moving scientific applications to production. Team lead for a team of computational engineers. Built various smaller ad-hoc solutions for business problems on very short time scales. Drove key technology decisions working with the CTO directly around which big data technologies to focus our efforts on.
Highlights
- A dynamic ad serving product based on real-time weather conditions.
- An in-house monitoring and alerting web application used by all account managers and analysts to manage active advertising campaigns (~$150M in spend).
- A Prediction algorithm for detecting non-human web traffic using boosted trees.
CIMSO
Stellenbosch, South Africa
June 2007 – March 2012
Software Engineer
Design, enhancement, optimization and maintenance of a large Delphi-based hospitality focused desktop software suite deployed throughout Africa and South East Asia.
Highlights
- Implemented an online hotel reservation portal in web2py with live synchronization to the rest of the software suite.
- Embedded LibreOffice inside the hotel management application with the purpose of allowing for unified storage and management of documents.
- Developed a generic database abstraction layer. The database abstraction layer provides statically typed wrappers around any given database table with flexible code generation in order to support multiple database architectures.
- Developed a generic reporting engine that supports arbitrary grouping of data with the purpose of providing customizable reports for hotel and financial management.
Volunteer
conda-forge
March 2018 – Present
core contributor
Core maintainer for conda-forge
Highlights
- Developed several of the parts of conda-smithy, a tool to dynamically generate build recipe repositories for conda packaging
- Conda-lock a lightweight locking mechanism to aid in reproducibility of conda environments.
conda
June 2022 – Present
Steering council member
Help to drive standards and best practices for the conda ecosystem
Contact
United States
Raleigh, North Carolina US
919-985-9072
Education
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2008 2012
Stellenbosch University
Master of Science
Mathematical Statistics
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2007 2007
University of Stellenbosch
Bachelor of Science (Honours)
Mathematical Statistics
-
2004 2006
University of Stellenbosch
Bachelor of Commerce
Actuarial Science
Skills
Programming languages
Python
Go
Rust
Scala
Delphi
R
Markdown
Notable software libraries with extensive experience
Conda
gRPC
Earthly
Dask
Apache Arrow
Apache Spark
Jupyter stack
Apache Airflow
Devops Tools
Kubernetes
Terraform
ArgoCD
Pulumi
Github Actions
Ansible
Chef
Cloud Experience
AWS
GCP
Interests
Wine
Cooking
Travel
Hiking
Woodworking
Gaming