Senior Software and Platform Engineer with 10+ years of experience spanning backend software engineering, cloud infrastructure, platform engineering, and architecture. I combine hands-on engineering with technical leadership, helping teams turn organizational goals into pragmatic technical strategies and reliable, scalable systems.
I work across application development, distributed systems, AWS, Kubernetes, Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, observability, and cloud-native architecture. I contribute to architectural direction, evaluate technical trade-offs, align engineering teams and stakeholders, and turn technical strategy into practical execution.
Software Engineer, MindWalk
Mar, 2026 - Present
Backend/Data/DevOps/Architecture
Defined an S3 immutability and deletion protection strategy across ~300 buckets, aligning CIS requirements with scalable AWS architecture and broader SOC2/ISO27001/SOX compliance initiatives.
Senior Developer, DevOps, Hootsuite
Sep, 2024 - Feb, 20261 year 5 months
DevOps/Architecture
Acted as a technical advisor across backend, CI/CD, and AWS infrastructure domains, aligning engineering practices with overarching business objectives and shaping long-term platform strategy.
Spearheaded the organizational adoption of OpenTelemetry, collaborating with a cross-functional SIG from 3-4 teams to define standards, and established Kubernetes auto-instrumentation for self-paced onboarding of core services to accelerate root-cause analysis.
Co-designed Karpenter-based Kubernetes autoscaling and next-gen bootstrapping, delivering a 5-15% improvement in resource efficiency over legacy Autoscaling Groups (ASGs).
Elevated the CI/CD team's capabilities through mentorship, introducing robust workflows, validating strategic architecture decisions, and guiding trade-off analyses.
Fostered strong cross-functional alignment between Platform, SRE, and product engineering teams by leading structured architecture knowledge-sharing and design reviews.
Facilitated the technical integration of acquired teams by validating their technical concerns, communicating architectural vision, and ensuring a seamless migration onto the core cloud platform.
Championed a culture of rigorous documentation and design clarity, leveraging modern tools to generate system diagrams and decision support frameworks across the engineering organization.
Senior Developer, TrendMiner
Jun, 2020 - Aug, 20244 years 2 months
Backend/DevOps/Architecture
Led the adoption of GitOps and CI/CD modernization using GitHub Actions and Argo CD, separating test/deploy stages and parallelizing workloads to reduce build and deployment times by 50-70% while improving DORA metrics across engineering teams.
Improved internal processes including release management, third-party licensing verification, escrow kit compilation, and software delivery building blocks.
Advocated for API-first development, GitOps, and Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) principles across engineering teams.
Helped evolve the platform towards a cloud-native architecture.
Onboarded and mentored 3 DevOps team members, guiding them through CI/CD practices, operational processes, and DevOps culture.
Facilitated cross-team technical discussions, architectural reviews, and knowledge-sharing sessions.
Coached peers on infrastructure best practices and CI/CD improvements, enabling smoother deployments and developer productivity.
Senior Developer, Hippovibe
Aug, 2019 - Jun, 202010 months
Backend/DevOps/Architecture
Re-architected the database layer, migrating from a database-per-tenant architecture to a shared-database multi-tenant model using Java/Spring on AWS Fargate and RDS (PostgreSQL).
Eliminated release rollout bottlenecks and reduced customer onboarding time to near-instantaneous.
Solution Engineer, ACA IT-Solutions
Oct, 2016 - Aug, 20192 years 10 months
Backend/Frontend/DevOps
Developed full-stack features using Java, Spring, PostgreSQL, and Angular for a broad application landscape of an occupational healthcare and prevention provider.
Developer, Tradelec International NV
Jan, 2015 - Oct, 20161 year 9 months
Backend/Frontend
Enhanced the Intouch product with an integrator backend where modules per integration could be easily maintained.
Spearhead OpenTelemetry Tailsampling setup
Aug, 2025 - Feb, 20266 months
Designed and drove the organizational rollout of an OpenTelemetry Tail-sampling architecture, establishing a scalable, long-term observability strategy that simplified team onboarding and unified telemetry data across the engineering org.
Hootsuite's Cluster Provisioning and Autoscaling
Jan, 2025 - Feb, 20261 year 1 month
Architected next-generation cluster bootstrapping, seamless cutover processes, and intelligent autoscaling for Hootsuite's Kubernetes fleet. Co-designed robust Day-Zero, Day-One, and Day-Two operational frameworks, significantly improving infrastructure agility and platform resilience.
Next increments for Hootsuite's Observability Stack
Sep, 2024 - Feb, 20261 year 5 months
Led strategic reviews of Production Operations Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and expanded observability capabilities by developing advanced testing and generation tooling within a GitOps-driven observability ecosystem.
Jun, 2020 - Aug, 20244 years 2 months
Spearheaded the transformation of the application landscape toward a cloud-native architecture. Designed and implemented robust, GitOps-driven CI/CD workflows that optimized developer experience while ensuring stringent security and operational reliability.
Certified Kubernetes Application Developer
CI/CD modernization, reducing deployment times by 40%
GitOps enrolment
Led initiatives around Golang proficiency within the team
Leading developer experience improvements
Platform Architectural Improvements
Release Management
Aug, 2019 - Jun, 202010 months
Re-architected the legacy platform for high availability and elastic scalability, leveraging AWS cloud services to ensure a consistently stable and highly resilient user experience.
Migrated database architecture from database-per-tenant to a shared multi-tenant PostgreSQL model on AWS RDS/Fargate, resolving deployment bottlenecks and enabling instant client onboarding.
Oct, 2016 - Aug, 20192 years 10 months
Implemented end-to-end modernization and feature expansion of the IDEWE platforms, systems enabling professionals to manage workplace safety and legal compliance.
Migrated backend services from DropWizard to Spring Boot, improving performance and maintainability, and migrated frontend from AngularJS to Angular, enhancing user experience
Intouch-Backoffice, Intouch-Integrator and Intouch-Permits
Jun, 2015 - Oct, 20161 year 4 months
Designed and developed critical third-party integrations and core product features for the Intouch suite, expanding product capabilities and enabling seamless data exchange with external municipal services.
Integrated with: https://www.geosparc.com/en/about-geosparc
Integrated with: https://www.skidata.com/en-us/
Integrated with: https://overheid.vlaanderen.be/informatie-vlaanderen/producten-diensten/gegevensdelingsplatform-magda
Volume Printing Gateway Service
Jan, 2015 - Jun, 20155 months
Developed a printing service integration with Speos (BPost) to enable automated, high-volume printing of physical documents, streamlining document delivery for Intouch platform users.
Enhanced the Intouch platform to enable geographically optimized printing, reducing document delivery times.
AWS
Kubernetes (EKS, Helm, Kustomize)
AWS ALB Controller
Terraform
Containerization (Docker, Podman)
FinOps (Cloud Cost Optimization)
OpenTelemetry (OTel)
Prometheus
Grafana
SLO Design
DORA & SPACE Metrics
Argo (CD, Events, Workflows)
GitHub Actions
Jenkins
Ansible
Golang
Python
TypeScript
Java
PostgreSQL
MySQL
Flyway
Liquibase
SQLC
GitHub
GitLab
Atlassian
OpsLevel
Snyk
Trivy
SonarQube
HashiCorp Vault
Linux (Alma, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu)
Computer Science, Transitionprogram, KU Leuven
Jan, 2012 - Jan, 2014
Applied Informatics, Professional Bachelor, XIOS Hogeschool Limburg (now PXL)
Jan, 2009 - Jan, 2012
Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) ID: LF-rskg4xkkou, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)
Issued on: Mar 16, 2024
Open Source
Development Experience
System Design
Software Architecture
Cloud Native Computing Foundation
I enjoyed working with Michiel. Michiel is inquisitive and always open to change. He frequently experiments with various tools and technologies and can then apply them effectively.
I thoroughly enjoyed working with Michiel at Hootsuite. As colleagues on the DevOps team, we tackled complex projects, including defining our platform SLOs and optimizing our Kubernetes clusters cutover process. Michiel is an exceptionally strong engineer. He is proactive, dives deep into technical challenges, and consistently brings innovative ideas for new tools to the table. He was a key driver in improving our platform's reliability and efficiency. He's a strong contributor and a great team player. I highly recommend him.
Working with Michiel was a blast, he is really skilled and go far beyond the ask by creating blog posts, documentation and trying to push things for change. I learned a ton working besides Michiel and hope to have another opportunity to work together. Wish you well and good luck on your new adventure!
I was Michiel's direct manager during his time at Hootsuite and was constantly impressed by his abilities and insights. In the year that we worked together, he was able to not only onboard onto our tech stack and start meaningfully contributing far ahead of my expectations, but he spearheaded our rollout of OTel for distributed tracing despite being brand-new to most of the related tooling. To me this demonstrates his ability to learn and work with new tools & technologies, which I believe is an essential skill for anyone in the space. In my opinion, Michiel would be an excellent addition to any DevOps/SRE/Platform Engineering team
I worked with Michiel during his time at Hootsuite and was consistently impressed by his technical depth and fresh thinking. He brought great ideas to the domains I was working on and has a real knack for writing clear, thoughtful proposals which move things forward. Michiel is self-driven and brings the kind of energy and expertise that genuinely makes teams better.
Working with Michiel has shown me how skilled he is at tackling complex technical topics and explaining them in a way that’s easy for everyone to grasp. He’s a natural communicator, and his presentations are always engaging, insightful, and impressive.
Michiel is one of those engineers who brings both strong technical skills and genuine enthusiasm to every project. He is highly motivated, proactive, and always full of creative ideas to improve team efficiency and product quality. Working with him was inspiring, and I can confidently say any company would benefit greatly from having Michiel on board.
I have worked with Michiel for the last year, and over that time I was always impressed by how willing he was to delve into the details of complex problems. Michiel always offered new perspectives and possible solutions to active challenges while searching out the best practice approach. Michiel is a great resource to bounce ideas off of, and to investigate new opportunities that help you keep up to date and informed of the direction in industry. Definitely a huge asset to any team.
I worked with Michiel at TrendMiner for a brief period. He joined the operations team to gain more experience in managing cloud resources, Kubernetes and on-premise infrastructure. Having a strong background in software architecture and development made him an essential person in technical discussions. He's a real team player and will always go the extra mile if you need him.
I worked in the same team for half a year and in closely related teams for another year with Michiel. Always curious and enthusiastic about new technologies he's someone who you can rely on when you need someone to drive innovation. When you have questions he's there to help you out, explaining thing with just the right level of complexity. I honestly love to work with colleagues like Michiel, who give you motivation to improve yourself. Because there is a difference between doing a job and doing a job right.
I worked with Michiel for his last year at the Trendminer. I appreciate his reaction speed, strong chain thinking and always is a good mood person. It was a pleasure to solve issues together with him.