Gustavo Santos – Data Product Delivery & Lead Data Engineer

Gustavo Santos

Data Product & Platform Lead

I design, deliver, and fix data products and platforms in complex environments, from cloud migrations and governance to high-scale data products used by millions of customers.

I’m focused on roles where I can own the data function end-to-end, building or repairing teams, processes, and platforms, on a path to Head of Data Engineering.

I deliver and stabilise data products and platforms so that teams can trust their data and move faster.

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Snapshot

1.8M+

clients served by data products

60+ TB/day

data processed in production

Priority-1

programs rescued & stabilised

Selected highlights

Elia · Risk & governance

Turning a broken initiative into a structured program

Took over a program with no clear business requirements, processes, documentation or stable team. Introduced documentation standards, designed and aligned cross-department business processes, and built a realistic roadmap with regular communication and deliveries. Secured support to scale data governance and IT into a two-product program of ~15 people, turning a stalled project into an organised, owned, priority-one initiative reducing firefighting around critical risk reporting and giving leadership a single, trusted view. Acted as de-facto data product owner

Toyota · Data platform

Data platform for a CEO-driven transformation

As part of a CEO-led effort to change how the company operates (with the C-HR as pilot model), helped shape and drive the migration of processing pipelines and data warehouses to Snowflake. This created a shared, governed data foundation across departments, where we could apply governance, track key metrics, and execute against a clear roadmap instead of each initiative reinventing its own data solution. Partnered with senior management and leadership to define the roadmap, governance, and scope.

KBC · Banking

Stabilising a critical data foundation

Led the redesign and migration of a fragile legacy exclusions module that was blocking delivery of multiple products and requiring constant hyper-care. By turning it into a stable, reusable data component, we reduced incidents reported by downstream teams and restored predictable delivery on top of that foundation. Reduced FTE necessary to handle it by 75% and restored predictable delivery timelines.

What I do

Stabilise critical data foundations

Legacy components, fragile flows, unclear ownership and constant hyper-care. I focus on turning these into predictable, reusable foundations so products can ship reliably and teams can stop firefighting.

Design platforms & governance for scale

Cloud/data platform migrations, Snowflake, and governance setups that give the organisation one shared, trusted foundation, instead of every project reinventing its own data solution.

Build teams and ways of working

Standards, mentoring, documentation and delivery workflows that make good practices the default. I care about sustainable delivery, not heroics.

How I think about data & teams

A data team is a product in itself – with clear owners, SLAs, and a roadmap, not a ticket factory.

Data platforms should be boring in production. The interesting part should be the insights and products, not nightly firefighting. Stability and predictability come first.

Governance is a speed enabler, not bureaucracy. Clear rules, metadata, and ownership let teams move safely and independently instead of slowing them down.

Documentation and contracts matter more than tools. Good documentation, clear SLAs, and data contracts between teams prevent more incidents than any single technology choice.

Growing people grows the platform. Mentoring engineers, setting standards, and giving them ownership is how the whole data function becomes stronger over time.

If we do it twice, we automate it. Repeated manual work is a design bug. Automation is how you scale without burning people out.

Clear ownership is non-negotiable. Every dataset, pipeline, and decision needs an accountable owner; otherwise, quality and reliability degrade quickly.

Processes must be clear, owned, and alive. From business request to BI dashboard, the flow should be explicit, agreed by stakeholders, and treated as a living system we continuously improve.

What I care about in the first weeks

At the start, I’m not trying to redesign everything. I focus on understanding a few critical things:

Where data can really hurt the business: the products, processes or reports that cause real damage if data is wrong, late, or missing.
Which flows are fragile and who owns them (or doesn’t): the pipelines, models, or systems everyone fears touching, and whether anyone is truly accountable.
How much firefighting is normalised: where people are doing “hero work” and treating incidents as routine instead of signals.
How teams actually work vs slide decks: how requests come in, how priorities are set, and how “done” is defined in reality.
Where minimal governance & documentation would unlock speed: the smallest set of rules and docs that would reduce friction and hand-offs.
Team health and skills: who is overloaded, who is underused, and what can realistically be taken on without burning people out.
What leadership really expects from data: how executives talk about data, what they think is possible, and where expectations and reality diverge.

Experience

A simplified view. Full details are on my LinkedIn and resume.

Energy & Transmission · Belgium

Took a broken project with no clear requirements, processes or ownership. Introduced documentation standards, designed cross-department business processes, built a realistic roadmap and secured support to grow the team into a two-product program of ~15 people, turning it into a structured, priority-one initiative.

Automotive · Belgium

Helped shape and drive the migration of processing pipelines and data warehouses to Snowflake as part of a CEO-led operating model change (C-HR pilot). Created a shared, governed data foundation across departments, enabling consistent metrics, governance and execution against a clear roadmap.

Banking · Belgium

Led the redesign and migration of fragile legacy components (including a critical exclusions module) that were blocking product delivery and required constant hyper-care. Stabilised these foundations as reusable data components, reducing incidents for downstream teams and restoring predictable delivery.

Retail & FMCG

Designed end-to-end flows from business questions to decision-ready dashboards and predictive models, supporting assortment and pricing decisions on 1,000+ SKUs and contributing to a double-digit margin increase. Focus on making analytics repeatable instead of one-off projects.

Let’s talk

If you want your data function to be stable, governed, actually shipping useful products, and need someone to own the hard parts. I’d be glad to talk.

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