I’m Dominik Vrbic. I build engineering organisations and bridge research with product.

I’ve spent the last decade in roles that sit awkwardly between engineering and the business, close enough to the code to make informed decisions, close enough to a P&L to be accountable for them. The interesting problems usually live in that gap.

Today I run the engineering and platform side of the Jan IngenHousz Institute, a philanthropically funded open-science institute on the Wageningen University campus, set up to accelerate global crop photosynthesis research under climate change and food security pressure. JII is funded by €62M over ten years from the Photosynthesis 2.0 Research Fund, and the team brings together engineers, data scientists, biochemists, biophysicists, geneticists, plant physiologists and breeders, working with collaborators at universities worldwide.

I’m Technical Program Manager for openJII, our open-source platform for distributed photosynthesis research. I own the technical vision and roadmap, run the in-house and external development teams, and connect the platform into JII’s wider scientific portfolio. The platform anchors a sensor-agnostic data ingestion framework, a Databricks lakehouse with bronze, silver and gold layers, and the cloud infrastructure that lets hundreds of research groups collaborate on real-time field measurements.

The work goes well beyond the platform itself. The role spans technical strategy, research collaborations, grant work, hiring, vendor selection, and capability-building across the team. The through-line is the same: helping plant scientists do science they couldn’t do before. It is the most interesting research-to-product problem I’ve come across.

Before JII I led engineering at INFO in Amsterdam, a digital product studio serving enterprise clients. As Tech Lead and Head of Engineering I sat on the senior leadership team, ran a 35-person organisation, owned a slice of P&L, and balanced presales and delivery with hands-on architecture. We launched a Databricks-centred data-platform practice that grew into a €1.5M revenue line at substantially higher margins than our typical work, and contributed to €4M+ in closed enterprise deals.

The clients I’m proudest of from INFO pushed us technically and commercially. Just Eat Takeaway, where we built the loyalty platform that scaled across nine countries and rode the full architecture pendulum from three repos into seven services into a Turborepo monorepo. Greenwheels, where I led data and monitoring consulting on Azure, Grafana, and Terraform. Evaq Lighting, an emergency-lighting IoT startup where service design ran all the way through to OpenThread firmware and a Databricks data lake. The published cases cover the engagements I can talk about openly; a handful of others (agritech digital transformation, vertical farming, technical due diligence for investors) sit under ongoing relationships, and I’m happy to discuss them one-on-one rather than on the open web.

Earlier I led engineering at Dephion, a health-tech startup of about 150 people, and spent the years prior as a freelance engineering lead and business consultant, building Meet Croatia, scaling SPICA, and doing technical due diligence for early-stage investors.

In parallel I’m finishing an MBA in AI, Data & Analytics at the University of Amsterdam, with a thesis on learned representations of photosynthesis time-series. The MBA was partly a deliberate choice to sharpen the language I use with C-level buyers. The gap between “I can build this” and “here’s why it makes commercial sense to build this” is wider than most technical leaders admit.

Outside the day job I take a small number of advisory engagements each year (board advisor, retained advisory, occasional technical due diligence). I write here when I have something I’d want to read myself. If any of that sounds like it overlaps with what you’re working on, get in touch.