Mar 2026 – present, freelance at Cegeka
Platform Architect
I lead the design and build of Cegeka's self-service internal developer platform. One click in a web portal gives a customer project everything it needs to ship: a GitHub organisation, repositories from templates, an Azure landing zone, pipelines, quality gates and team access. The platform is one of the building blocks of Cegeka's move to become an AI-native company: every project starts on a governed, secure foundation ready for AI-assisted delivery.
- Impact
- Project setup becomes a single click, with the same governance, security baseline and audit trail
- Scale
- 17 orchestrations, 44 activities and 3 codebases (backend, portal, infrastructure), built and led by me
- Stack
- .NET 10, Azure Durable Functions, React 19, TypeScript, Terraform, GitHub Enterprise, Azure Container Apps, Microsoft Entra ID
- I built the orchestration engine in .NET 10 on Azure Durable Functions and the Durable Task Scheduler, as a modular monolith with domain-driven design (MediatR, EF Core), retries, live progress and about 200 automated tests.
- I built the self-service portal in React 19 and TypeScript, with Entra ID sign-in, a typed client generated from OpenAPI, pre-flight checks and live tracking of long-running operations.
- I automate GitHub Enterprise Cloud: organisations, repositories from templates, environments, private VNet-injected runners and passwordless deployments through OpenID Connect federated identity.
- I provision secure-by-default Azure landing zones with Terraform: hub-and-spoke networking, Application Gateway with WAF, private endpoints, Key Vault, Container Apps, and diagnostics in Log Analytics.
- I onboard every project into SonarQube Cloud, Microsoft Entra ID team groups and Jira automatically, with email notifications and a full audit trail of who changed what.
- I designed the platform on zero-trust principles: private endpoints, with public network access off or limited to the corporate VPN; managed identities between services and OpenID Connect for deployments instead of passwords; Entra ID role-based access for every user and service; and TLS from the gateway to every backend, with certificate validation. Container images are signed and scanned (cosign, Trivy), Microsoft Defender for Cloud is enabled in Terraform, with its recommendations fixed in code rather than by hand to keep the secure score high, and the platform passed an OWASP ASVS Level 2 self-assessment.
- I set up GitHub Copilot with governance built in: repository instructions that encode the architecture, coding and security rules, approved MCP tools such as SonarQube, and the same quality gates and code review as every other change.
May 2025 – Nov 2025, freelance at Fédérale Assurance
Integration Architect & DevOps Engineer
Belgian insurer.
- I modernised more than ten BizTalk orchestrations into secure .NET 10 services (Minimal API, OpenAPI, OAuth 2.0, Key Vault, Application Insights), covered by xUnit unit and integration tests.
- I exposed legacy systems through Azure API Management, deployed with Bicep, as a service catalogue and a security layer for systems without native authentication.
- I migrated more than 50 classic Azure DevOps build pipelines to YAML on a shared framework, cutting maintenance effort.
- I coached developers on modern Azure practice: Container Apps and Durable Functions, managed identity and RBAC instead of passwords, Key Vault, structured logging, and proactive monitoring with OpenTelemetry.
- I reviewed solution designs for running cost and security, and solved issues that spanned infrastructure, network, security and development.
Nov 2023 – Jun 2024, freelance at D'Ieteren
Azure Architect & DevOps Engineer
Belgian importer and distributor of Volkswagen Group cars.
- I owned the Azure DevOps CI/CD platform and migrated every pipeline from classic to YAML.
- I led .NET development for the data platform team: microservices in .NET 6 and 8, Azure Durable Functions and SQL Server.
- I delivered containerised GraphQL APIs, including integrating Data API Builder with the in-house authorization provider.
- I upgraded the existing stack, from .NET Core 3.1 to .NET 8, and Durable Functions from in-process to the isolated worker.
- I monitored application health and reviewed designs for security (OAuth, firewalls), performance (HTTP compression, over-fetching, SQL schema) and cost.
Sep 2022 – Mar 2023, freelance at The RingRing Company
Lead DevOps Engineer
Belgian platform that automates business messaging by SMS, email and voice.
- I ran the YAML CI/CD pipelines, with SonarQube code quality checks, and the Kubernetes deployments with Octopus Deploy.
- I deployed an on-premises Kubernetes monitoring stack with Prometheus and Grafana.
- I helped developers troubleshoot production incidents and turned the findings into improvements, with an eye on cost and the learning curve.
Apr 2022 – Aug 2022, freelance at Aprico
Solution Architect & Team Lead
Belgian IT consultancy.
- I led a team of developers in Tunisia, as tech lead and Scrum master, building a web and mobile application on Azure.
- I set the .NET 6 architecture: microservices, domain-driven design, event-driven design and CQRS, with unit tests.
- I ran the Azure DevOps environment: CI/CD, Terraform deployments, release management and the Git branching strategy.
- I maintained the network architecture: Application Gateway, load balancing, health probes and firewall.
Feb 2022 – Apr 2022, Capgemini
Senior Consultant
Global IT consultancy, my last role as an employee.
- I designed and deployed a hub-and-spoke network on Azure to host a low-code platform, with segregated production and non-production environments: the same landing zone pattern I now build at platform scale.
Feb 2020 – Feb 2022, YPTO / SNCB-NMBS
Technical Architect
IT subsidiary of the Belgian national railways.
- I led a team of five developers building a React Native mobile app on .NET Core microservices, with code quality enforced through SonarQube and unit tests.
- I designed the Azure architecture of microservice projects, and their OpenAPI and GraphQL APIs.
- I was application owner of the Jenkins and Azure DevOps CI/CD platforms.
Jul 1998 – Dec 2019, Bureau van Dijk / Moody's Analytics
Team Lead and Tech Lead
Provider of company and financial data, such as Orbis, part of Moody's since 2017.
- 2017 I led a development team, reporting directly to the CTO, and handled planning and career development.
- 2017 I built a highly available NoSQL cluster storing more than 100 million patent documents.
- 2016 I set up a cloud infrastructure in China: firewall, load balancer, health monitoring, SQL databases and web servers.
- 2007 I built a distributed application for encoding merger and acquisition data, used in Brussels, Manchester and Singapore and synchronised with SQL merge replication.
- 2005 I built a distributed monitoring system for web applications, servers and routers that acted on failed nodes and reported to managers and QA.
- 2000 I built a continuous integration system that automated source branching and setup deployment.
