AboutSenior Engineer

Senior Engineer & Fractional Tech Lead

Filip Van den Broeck

Senior full-stack engineer and fractional tech lead based in Antwerp. 15 years of experience building and maintaining enterprise systems, now combined with a structured, hands-on approach to AI-assisted development.

The Story So Far

I spent most of my career inside enterprise engineering at BNP Paribas Fortis. I worked as a senior developer and later as Technical Lead for the Enablement project within Centric, a financial platform serving more than 100,000 users.

Alongside that work, I built DinnerGift from scratch and ran it as a commercial platform — owning the backend, frontend, architecture, deployment, and long-term maintenance.

Those environments taught me what production responsibility actually means: making trade-offs under delivery pressure, keeping systems understandable over time, and knowing when a technically plausible solution is not yet safe to ship.

The Shift

Over the last two years, I have been exploring what changes when AI becomes part of the everyday engineering workflow — not as an autocomplete tool, but as a collaborator that can research, implement, test, review, and document.

I built a workflow in which AI agents handle much of that volume while I remain responsible for architecture, security, quality, and release decisions. The most important lessons have not come from the tasks the agents complete successfully, but from learning where they sound confident while being wrong.

That workflow now shapes how I work. When I join a team as a developer or tech lead, I can also help introduce the useful parts of it — adapted to the team's codebase, constraints, and existing practices.

The tools behind my workflow

I run Hermes Agent, an open-source autonomous AI coding platform, as my core development tool. It operates in a persistent loop: receiving tasks, reasoning through them, writing and executing code, reading test output, and self-correcting. The open-weight model is served through Ollama Cloud. Ollama states that prompt and response content is not stored or logged and is not used for training; vendor documentation should be reviewed against the requirements of each engagement.

Alongside Hermes, I use Claude for visual design review — it can see and score a screenshot, but never touches code. Two AIs, two roles: one implements, one critiques.

What This Means for You

I begin with the actual work: understanding the codebase, delivery pressure, technical constraints, and the way the team collaborates.

From that position, I can help improve both the software and the workflow around it. That may include architectural guidance, hands-on implementation, stronger review practices, or introducing AI support where it removes repetitive work without weakening accountability.

The goal is not to maximize AI usage. The goal is to help the team deliver good software more consistently.

If that sounds like what you need, see how I work.

What I Bring to the Team

Production Engineering

Fifteen years of building and maintaining real systems. Architecture and implementation decisions are grounded in reliability, security, delivery pressure, and long-term maintainability.

Technical Leadership

Clear technical direction without disappearing into abstractions. I contribute to the work, support engineers, make trade-offs explicit, and communicate honestly with product owners and stakeholders.

AI-Augmented Delivery

A structured AI workflow for implementation, testing, review, and documentation. I bring the practices I use in my own production work and adapt them to the team's actual environment.

Experience Highlights

  1. Technical Lead — BNP Paribas Fortis / Centric

    Technical Lead for the Enablement project within Centric, a financial platform used by 100,000+ users. Contributed across backend and frontend delivery, architecture decisions, and team quality practices.

  2. Owner & Full-Stack Developer — DinnerGift

    Built end-to-end from concept to production: React/Next.js frontend, Express REST API, MongoDB, and CircleCI CI/CD pipeline. Ran independently for years as a commercial platform.

  3. AI-Augmented Development Workflow

    Configured and extended Hermes Agent, an open-source autonomous coding platform, into a production workflow — custom skills, persistent memory, and multi-agent orchestration. Paired with Claude for visual design review, so implementation and critique are handled by separate AIs. Runs on open-weight models via Ollama Cloud.