Sander Ardinois

Experience

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  Ardinois

  Executive Data & AI Advisory

  Jan 2026 - Present

  Through Ardinois, I take on fractional CAIO and Head of Data & AI roles, stepping into enterprises to lead their data and AI agenda directly.

  • Act as the senior Data & AI leader for organizations without one, owning strategy, operating model, and the path from pilots to production-grade AI.
  • Set and drive the AI roadmap with C-suite and business leaders, prioritizing the use cases that move the P&L.
  • Build the team, platform foundations, and governance needed to scale AI past experimentation into operations.
  • Particular depth in retail and consumer.
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  H&M

  Vice President of Artificial Intelligence

  May 2024 - Jan 2026

  As one of the world’s largest fashion companies with more than 132,000 employees, H&M offers fashion and quality at the best price across global brands and channels.

  • Led a ~100-person global Data & AI organization, with cross-functional engineering oversight of a 400+ person environment.
  • Deployed enterprise AI from concept to production across demand forecasting, inventory optimization, pricing, markdown, recommendations, and generative AI.
  • Built scalable ML platforms and MLOps practices to shorten iteration cycles and improve production reliability.
  • Partnered with merchandising, supply chain and digital teams to embed data-driven decisioning into retail operations.
  • Member of the H&M Engineering Board, setting company-wide technical standards.
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  Nike

  Director of Artificial Intelligence

  Oct 2021 - May 2024

  NIKE, Inc. is a purpose-driven organisation committed to moving the world forward through the power of sport; a global leader in athletic footwear, apparel and digital services.

  • Built and owned a $100M+ EBIT AI portfolio across demand forecasting, close-out optimization, inventory, and personalization, tied to marketplace and digital growth.
  • Scaled the regional AI function to 11 cross-functional teams across multiple European markets.
  • Represented EMEA on Enterprise Data & Analytics and Global AI leadership teams.
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  Nike

  ML Engineering Manager

  Aug 2020 - Nov 2021

  • Managed ML engineering teams responsible for production model delivery, reliability and feature rollout.
  • Introduced CI/CD for models, standardized model monitoring (drift, performance) and incident runbooks for ML failures.
  • Partnered with product managers and data engineers to translate use cases into production-ready ML services.
  • Coached engineers on reproducible training, model versioning and secure model serving patterns to reduce operational risk.
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  Nike

  Data Platforms Product Lead

  Jul 2019 - Aug 2020

  • Led the Data Platforms product area — defined roadmap, APIs and SLAs for data products consumed by analytics & ML.
  • Delivered scalable ingestion, semantic layering and access patterns to reduce duplicate engineering across use cases.
  • Prioritised platform investments that increased developer velocity and made AI capabilities easier to reuse across teams.
  • Worked with security and compliance to operationalize data contracts, lineage and access control for sensitive datasets.
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  NoCeiling | Uncovering Skills

  Head of Data

  Mar 2018 - Aug 2019

  • At Dynasource Sander is responsible for building the data capabilities within the organization.
  • Architect and build a data lake & platform on Microsoft Azure & Databricks (Spark, Kubernetes, Airflow, Azure Data Lake, Neo4J, Azure EventHubs)
  • Help define the organization’s data strategy
  • Build the data team
  • Setup the data engineering practice in the organization
  • Bring data science projects from POC to production
  • Recommendation Engine
  • Using NLP for building a knowledge graph
  • Setup BI & reporting
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  LeasePlan

  Data Platform Architect (a.i)

  Nov 2017 - Mar 2018

  We’re Ayvens, a global leader in sustainable mobility, committed to making mobility easy for our clients.

  • Architected data platform solutions for fleet & mobility use cases (telemetry ingestion, vehicle lifecycle analytics).
  • Designed ETL/streaming pipelines and storage patterns to support near-real-time telematics and maintenance analytics.
  • Defined integration strategy between operational systems (leasing, CRM) and analytics layers to enable autonomous workflows.
  • Advised on cloud migration, data governance and cost optimisation while keeping data privacy and regional requirements in focus.
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  Coolblue

  Senior Data Engineer (Contractor)

  Jun 2017 - Jan 2018

  • As senior data engineer at Cooblue, Sander helped the transition from traditional BI to modern data processing. Key projects:
  • Set up a data lake using Cloud Storage on the Google Cloud Platform.
  • Set up a data processing environment using Spark on the Google Cloud Platform.
  • Build Spark jobs and data pipelines to perform analysis, and attribution of e-mail marketing campaigns.
  • Integrate reporting into BigQuery.

• Ardinois Consulting

  Owner

  May 2017 - Dec 2021

  Ardinois Consulting is a company.

  • Operated as an independent Big Data architect and consultant delivering end-to-end platform and analytics designs.
  • Designed data architectures and ETL/streaming pipelines for clients across retail and services; focused on resilience and observability.
  • Delivered consultancy engagements covering data modelling, infrastructure selection and implementation roadmaps.
  • Provided hands-on implementation support and mentored engineering teams on best practices for production ML and data ops.
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  ING

  Data Engineer (Contractor)

  Aug 2016 - May 2017

  • Design and develop an event driven monitoring and alerting application for the DSE Cassandra using an event driven architecture. (Scala, akka, Kafka, Docker ,DSE Graph, Docker, CI)
  • Developing a graph database solution for a high throughput, low latency authentication API (Scala, Neo4J, DSE Graph, Gatling)
  • Performance testing and optimization of NoSql solutions. (Gatling, DSE Cassandra, Neo4J)
  • Consulting with other teams on the use of Cassandra and Graph Databases.
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  BigData Republic

  Data Scientist / Engineer

  Jul 2016 - May 2017

  BigData Republic is a hands-on data consultancy that builds data applications, predictive models and platforms; a strategic partner helping organisations create impact and value with data and analytics.

  • Built production-grade data pipelines and ML models for clients across retail, energy and public sector engagements.
  • Implemented MLOps patterns (orchestration, testing, model promotion) to move experimental models into stable production.
  • Delivered end-to-end solutions from data ingestion through feature engineering to serving and monitoring.
  • Worked in small cross-functional teams to translate business problems into measurable analytics and ML outcomes.
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  EY

  Advisor - Data Analytics

  Jan 2015 - Jun 2016

  EY provides consulting, assurance, tax and transaction services that help solve clients' toughest challenges and build a better working world.

  • Advised clients on analytics-driven decision-making: translated business questions into analytics roadmaps and KPI frameworks.
  • Delivered diagnostic analytics and advanced models to unlock efficiency and reveal cost or revenue opportunities.
  • Supported clients in defining data strategy, target operating models and governance to operationalize insights.
  • Worked closely with cross-functional stakeholders to embed analytics into process and change initiatives for measurable impact.
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  To70 Aviation

  Junior Aviation Consultant

  Aug 2012 - Dec 2014

  • As Junior Aviation consultant I worked on operations research and airport development projects.
  • Key tasks:
  • Use data science techniques on large sets and surveillance data sets to build predictive models and forecasting tools.
  • Development and maintenance of an aircraft tracking system to analyze and store live ADS-B (aircraft surveillance) data