About

The background behind the work.

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

20+Years in the field
F500Client calibre
3Core verticals
Brett VanderPlaats

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.

Now

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.

Before

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.

Foundation

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.

Healthcare·Financial Services·Manufacturing

U.S. Navy Cryptologic Technician — TS/SCI, previously held. Purdue University, B.S. Computer Technology.

Client Background

  • FIS Global · Eli Lilly · Takeda · MISO Energy
  • Mizuho Bank · IU Health · Community Health Network
  • California Dental Association · Autocar Manufacturing
  • Gyansys · Vantiv Systems

Domain Depth

  • HealthcareHL7, FHIR, Epic, Cerner, Meditech, EDW, MDM
  • Financial ServicesBanking, Capital Markets, Compliance, Payments
  • ManufacturingIoT, MES, Quality Analytics, Supply Chain

Certifications & Education

  • Microsoft Certified: Azure Data Engineer Associate
  • SnowPro Core Certified — Snowflake
  • Purdue University — B.S. Computer Technology
Where I operate
HealthcareMulti-hospital systems, clinical data integration, patient safety constraints, HL7/FHIR, Epic, MDM.
Financial ServicesBanking, capital markets, compliance pipelines, payments infrastructure, data under regulatory pressure.
ManufacturingIoT pipelines from factory floor to data warehouse, MES integration, quality analytics, supply chain.
Technology

What's in the stack.

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?

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