I’m Dominik. I’m the Technical Program Manager for openJII, an open-source platform for photosynthesis research at the Jan IngenHousz Institute, built on AWS and Databricks. Before that I led the engineering organisation at INFO in Amsterdam, where I worked to keep the business profitable while delivering the products our customers needed. I’m finishing an MBA in AI, Data & Analytics at the University of Amsterdam.
I take a small number of board-advisor and retained-advisory engagements each year, focused on engineering leadership, AI & data strategy, lakehouse architecture (Databricks / Spark / Delta), and turning research-grade systems into commercial product. I also help founders take an early B2B SaaS product from prototype to production-ready and through the path to SOC 2 or HIPAA, assembling a small senior team to build when it’s needed.
A code review on a small UX change collided with a notebook full of 45,451 free-text plant-science questions. The data made a stronger argument than any hunch could: don’t hardcode what your users call things.
First entry in a recurring short-form series. My second week on the job at JII, I was on a plane to Accra to help train plant breeders, crop physiologists, statisticians and data scientists at the first dedicated photosynthesis hackathon. A few notes on what made it work, on what I learned about training a room full of domain experts, and on what the platform underneath quietly enabled.
