Gustavo Santos
Gustavo Santos
Enterprise Data Operating Models, Platforms & Governance

Lead data platform, governance, and operating-model transformations in complex environments where delivery is unstable, ownership is unclear, and leadership needs clearer roadmap decisions, stronger prioritisation, and a function it can rely on.

Best fit for organisations dealing with legacy complexity, weak ownership, governance debt, and delivery instability.

Turning fragile data estates into trusted business capabilities

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Snapshot
1.8M+ clients served
Served by data products
Scaled to 15 people
Program grew in product, governance and engineering
Priority-1 turnaround
Rescued and stabilised critical initiative
60+ TB/day in production
Processed by data program
75% less support effort
Stabilised key legacy foundations
Leadership exposure
Worked with senior management and directors

Selected highlights

Elia · Risk & governance
Turning a broken initiative into a structured priority-one programme

Took over a stalled initiative with no clear business requirements, weak processes, limited documentation, and no stable team structure. Brought clearer operating discipline across governance, engineering, and business stakeholders by defining ownership, documenting processes, and creating a more realistic roadmap and delivery cadence. Led delivery direction and operating structure into a priority-one, two-product program of around 15 people, reducing firefighting around critical risk reporting and giving leadership a more trusted, consistent view.

Toyota · Enterprise data platform
Building shared data foundations in a CEO-driven transformation

Contributed to a CEO-sponsored transformation using the C-HR model as a pilot, helping shape the migration of processing pipelines and data warehouses to Snowflake. Replacing fragmented, initiative-specific solutions with a more shared and governed data foundation across departments, making it easier to apply governance, track key metrics, and execute against a clearer roadmap. Worked with senior management and Directors to align data scope, governance, reporting expectations, and delivery priorities.

KBC · Investment
Stabilising a critical legacy data foundation

Led the redesign and migration of a fragile legacy exclusions module that was blocking multiple products and creating continuous hyper-care for downstream teams. Made key calls across ownership, process, migration direction, and foundation design to turn it into a more stable, reusable data component. The result reduced support effort by 75%, lowered downstream incidents, and restored more predictable delivery on top of that foundation.

Leadership scope

Beyond platform and delivery execution, I have also contributed to the broader leadership layer of complex data transformations:

  • Owned or shaped quarterly and yearly roadmaps across tech, governance, and business teams
  • Drove prioritisation across competing delivery, resilience, and governance needs
  • Partnered in team structure design as programmes scaled
  • Contributed to role definition, candidate evaluation, and onboarding
  • Acted as a functional lead across critical engineering streams, setting expectations around quality and ownership
  • Advised on platform investment, staffing mix, and resourcing trade-offs
  • Helped senior stakeholders navigate trade-offs between delivery speed, governance maturity, and operational risk

My focus

Stabilise critical data foundations

Turn 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.

Shape the roadmap and delivery sequence

Turn reactive environments into structured roadmaps by sequencing initiatives, managing dependencies, defining milestones, and making explicit trade-offs between platform debt, migrations, governance work, and new delivery requests.

Build the operating model around the platform

Define how the function works in practice: ownership boundaries, prioritisation rules, team interaction, standards, documentation, and where governance needs to be enforced first.

Grow teams and leadership capability

As programmes scale, I help define the roles needed, support hiring and onboarding, coach engineers through ambiguity, and raise expectations around ownership, quality, and delivery discipline.

Operating principles

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 hold myself accountable for: Clear strategy, predictable delivery, a downward trend in incidents and escalations, a healthy team that people want to join, and the ability to explain what’s going on in three slides to a non-technical executive.

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.

Data Platform & Engineering Lead – Elia
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.
Project Data Manager – Toyota Motor Europe
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.
Data Engineer – KBC Bank
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.
BI Analyst – Louis Delhaize
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.

About

Over time, my role has expanded beyond platform delivery itself. In high-priority transformations, I have helped shape roadmaps, define team structures, support hiring, guide prioritisation, coach engineers through ambiguity, and frame trade-offs for senior stakeholders.

My strongest foundation is still in data platform, governance, and delivery transformation, but I operate with the data function in mind, not just the technology stack

Let’s talk

If your data function needs stronger foundations, clearer ownership, and more predictable delivery, I’d be glad to talk.

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