20+ years. Fortune 500 clients. Three verticals. One operator who's seen these problems break before — and knows exactly where the failure modes are.

Brett VanderPlaats
Founder & Principal Architect
The work has always been the same at its core: organizations with data they can't use, infrastructure that wasn't designed for what they're asking it to do, and a gap between what the business needs and what the technology can deliver. Twenty years of closing that gap — in healthcare, financial services, and manufacturing, for organizations where getting it wrong has real consequences.
AI as orchestration logic — not inference handed off and hoped for.
Built a talent-matching system where the hard engineering isn't the model — it's the confidence calibration that determines when a match surfaces versus stays in the queue. Designed a contract-monitoring system that watches partner API specs for schema drift, routes breaking changes through human review, and auto-heals downstream records once the upstream fix lands. Fortune 500 production systems, not demos.
Making a dozen clinical systems coherent enough to act on.
Director of Enterprise Data Architecture at Community Health Network — a multi-hospital system where patient data lived across platforms that were never designed to talk to each other. Built the integration layer, master data management, and unified data warehouse that made the system coherent. The design constraint in healthcare data isn't throughput — being wrong about a patient record is a patient safety problem. That changes every architecture decision downstream.
Full-stack delivery ownership, across every vertical that handles data badly.
Multi-year engagements in healthcare, manufacturing, and finance — IoT pipelines for factory floors, financial data warehouses under SLA pressure, integration platforms mid-migration. Onshore and offshore teams. The pattern recognition from running those engagements — knowing where the failure modes are before they surface — is what an engagement with Aethera is actually buying.
U.S. Navy Cryptologic Technician — TS/SCI, previously held. Purdue University, B.S. Computer Technology.
Client Background
Domain Depth
Certifications & Education
AI & GenAI
RAG Pipelines, LLM Integration, Azure OpenAI (GPT-4/4o), Azure AI Foundry, Pinecone, Vector Search, Snowpark AI
Cloud
Azure (Synapse, Fabric, Data Factory, Databricks, Purview, Service Bus), AWS (S3, Glue, Athena, Redshift, Lake Formation), Snowflake
Data Engineering
ETL / ELT, Data Vault 2.0, Kimball, Inmon, Delta Lake, CDC, SCD, Lakehouse
Streaming & IoT
Confluent Kafka, Kafka Connect, Debezium (CDC), Azure Event Hubs, Azure IoT Hub / Edge, Spark Structured Streaming
Languages
Python, PySpark, SQL / T-SQL, C#, .NET, JavaScript
DevOps & Modeling
Azure DevOps, GitHub, JIRA, Erwin, TOGAF, ArchiMate
Seen enough?
Bring a real problem. Get a real answer.