Résumé/CV: Available upon request (or see LinkedIn)
Email: gbrits<at>gmail<dot>com
Hands-on principal engineer with 20+ years across backend systems, data-heavy products, search/retrieval, internal tools, and founder-led product work. Technical co-founder, CTO/CPO, architect, fractional technical lead, and engineering owner.
I work best where the business goal is clear but the technical shape still needs senior ownership: unclear requirements, fragmented tools and data, API boundaries, retrieval quality, and architecture that has to stay understandable as the product grows. I can own the technical architecture and system shape where needed, and I stay close enough to implementation to keep latency, operability, failure modes, and tradeoffs grounded in reality.
I work across the whole product system: internal tools, backend services, data/retrieval layers, API contracts, observability, and production behavior.
Selected work:
- Fractional principal engineer / architect for ground-up KPI/analytics platform rewrite (5-person team); company later exited for ~€10M.
- Technical founder / CTO / CPO for market-intelligence SaaS: live matching of 1M+ dynamic segments against continuous on-chain/off-chain streams; ClickHouse-backed pipelines processing billions of rows/day with near-real-time downstream availability.
- Marketplace search/matching rewrite (Elasticsearch, percolator-style saved searches, high-volume notification infrastructure) while keeping the live platform in production.
Looking for freelance, contract, fractional CTO, principal engineer, or technical lead roles where one senior person needs to hold the whole system in their head.
Best fit: backend-heavy products, analytics/data infrastructure, complex internal tools, search/retrieval systems, or early-stage teams that need architecture + implementation depth without a large engineering org.
Hands-on CTO / principal engineer with 20+ years in software engineering. Technical co-founder, CTO/CPO, architect, fractional product owner, and engineering lead.
I work best at the intersection of architecture and implementation: designing data-heavy systems well, then staying close enough to the engineering to keep latency, operability, failure modes, and tradeoffs grounded in reality.
Selected work: fractional lead/architect for ground-up KPI platform rewrite; 5-person FTE team; company later exited for €10M. CTO/CPO for crypto/data product; live matching of 1M+ complex dynamic slices against continuous on-chain/off-chain metric streams; high-throughput, near-real-time latency suitable for trading workflows. ClickHouse-backed worker pipelines processing billions of rows/day while preserving near-real-time downstream availability.
Looking for freelance, contract, fractional CTO, principal engineer, technical lead, or data engineering work. Best fit: backend-heavy products, analytics/data infrastructure, complex internal tools, low-latency pipelines, or early-stage teams that need one senior person with both breadth and depth.
Congrats with the launch. This looks great. Inferring schemas on the fly is awesome to get started quickly, but are there ways to explicitly define a schema if I wanted to? For example, thinking of setting column specific compression
Slightly tangent, but it would be really powerful to be able to train a model (through LoRa probably) on your datawarehouse, having table structures of facts and dimensions.
Self service BI would be a solved problem. No more building tedious widgets, but simply ask ChatGPT or similar for 'last 5 yours pNl by business unit'. Bonus points if based on cardinality, etc. it will properly choose the correct chart type (e.g.: stacked bar).
Q: But what if all signs in the building are in mirror writing?
A: If all signs in the building are in mirror writing, it would be a consistent theme throughout the building. In this case, the "push" sign written in mirror writing on the glass door should also be interpreted in the context of the building's theme. As a result, you should still push the door as the sign indicates, even though it's written in mirror writing.
I for one would welcome a second blogpost with the stateful example. I’ve been doing running totals (basically balances based on adding financial tx per account) but had to do it in some client code because I couldn’t figure out how to do a stateful resume in Sql
DAI did not loose peg. This story is completely fabricated. There's a tendency on HN to hate on everything crypto, but come on. Please just look at the data.
In fact, along side USDC and BUSD, DAI is (or at least has been) trading at a slight premium the last couple of days.
Same here. The semi-realistic backdrops is what's most off-putting to me. Part cartoon / part realistic messes with my suspension of disbelief or something
Willing to relocate: No, occasional travel OK.
Technologies: Backend architecture, data-intensive product systems, event-driven systems, low-latency pipelines, analytics infrastructure, search/retrieval, Node.js/TypeScript, ClickHouse, DuckDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, Vue, Tailwind
Résumé/CV: Available upon request (or see LinkedIn)
Email: gbrits<at>gmail<dot>com
Hands-on principal engineer with 20+ years across backend systems, data-heavy products, search/retrieval, internal tools, and founder-led product work. Technical co-founder, CTO/CPO, architect, fractional technical lead, and engineering owner.
I work best where the business goal is clear but the technical shape still needs senior ownership: unclear requirements, fragmented tools and data, API boundaries, retrieval quality, and architecture that has to stay understandable as the product grows. I can own the technical architecture and system shape where needed, and I stay close enough to implementation to keep latency, operability, failure modes, and tradeoffs grounded in reality.
I work across the whole product system: internal tools, backend services, data/retrieval layers, API contracts, observability, and production behavior.
Selected work: - Fractional principal engineer / architect for ground-up KPI/analytics platform rewrite (5-person team); company later exited for ~€10M. - Technical founder / CTO / CPO for market-intelligence SaaS: live matching of 1M+ dynamic segments against continuous on-chain/off-chain streams; ClickHouse-backed pipelines processing billions of rows/day with near-real-time downstream availability. - Marketplace search/matching rewrite (Elasticsearch, percolator-style saved searches, high-volume notification infrastructure) while keeping the live platform in production.
Looking for freelance, contract, fractional CTO, principal engineer, or technical lead roles where one senior person needs to hold the whole system in their head.
Best fit: backend-heavy products, analytics/data infrastructure, complex internal tools, search/retrieval systems, or early-stage teams that need architecture + implementation depth without a large engineering org.