Top 7 Engineering Leaders and Fractional CTOs in the Netherlands (2026)
Seven engineering leaders and fractional CTOs working in the Netherlands, with verifiable track records, stated engagement models and named sources.
A fractional CTO is an experienced technology leader who takes on a company's technical direction part-time, typically one or two days a week, instead of joining as a full-time executive. The Netherlands has a small and unusually visible group of such people. This list names seven of them, with the evidence behind every entry.
How this list was made
Lists like this one are usually assembled from whoever paid to be on them. This one was not, so it is worth being explicit about what earned an entry. Five criteria decided it.
- Public Netherlands or EU experience. The work has to be traceable to organisations a reader can look up, not asserted in the abstract.
- Verifiable engineering leadership work. Directing engineers, owning architecture or carrying delivery accountability — not solely writing code, however senior.
- Relevant startup or scale-up experience. Leadership at a company that had to grow, not only at one that was already large.
- A clear current engagement model. It has to be publicly stated how you would actually hire the person: days per week, retainer, interim, or coaching.
- No paid ranking. Nobody paid for placement, nobody was offered placement, and there are no affiliate or sponsored links anywhere in this article.
The seven are ordered alphabetically by surname. The numbering is a reading aid, not a ranking, and no attempt has been made to say who is better. Two names that surfaced during research were left out: one had an Amsterdam landing page but no verifiable presence in the country, and another had nothing to check beyond a social profile. A claim that cannot be sourced does not belong in a list whose whole value is that it can be.
The seven
1. Laurent Demouge
Demouge spent nine years as founder and CTO of Exxan, growing it from zero to twelve people, and afterwards worked as an external technical partner at Mazars. Earlier engagements include NS (Dutch Railways), L'Oréal's digital supply chain, and critical systems work at Thales. He is based in Houten in the province of Utrecht and works on site within a three-hour radius, which covers the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, western Germany and northern France.
His framing of the role is the sharpest of anyone here: a consultant delivers a report and leaves, while a fractional CTO stays involved — attending team meetings, reviewing architectural decisions, recruiting and evaluating technical profiles, and remaining accountable for outcomes over time. Engagements start at 8,000 euro per month on a six-month minimum, typically one and a half to two days a week. The terms are published at exxan.nl.
2. Zef Hemel
A caveat belongs at the top of this entry rather than buried in it: Hemel is the one person here who is not based in the Netherlands. He is Dutch, holds a PhD in computer science from Delft University of Technology, and is currently CTO of Fixly, a Polish service marketplace. He states that he operates primarily in central European time. He is included because his leadership record is among the strongest in Dutch-speaking Europe and his advisory work is openly available to teams in the region — but a reader looking strictly for someone in the country should note the exception.
Across fifteen years he has led teams ranging from a handful of engineers to more than a hundred, in start-ups, scale-ups and multinationals, moving through engineering manager, head of engineering, director of engineering, VP of engineering and CTO roles, with thirty years of programming underneath it. Three engagements are published: leadership coaching and mentoring in one-hour 1:1 sessions, interim engineering management on a full- or part-time daily rate, and scoped project consulting at a fixed price or hourly rate. The detail is at zef.me.
One note for searchers: a different and also well-known Zef Hemel is a Dutch urban and regional planner who holds a chair at Delft University of Technology and the University of Groningen. They are two different people.
3. Sander Hoogendoorn
Hoogendoorn is CTO at iBOOD and has led technology at half a dozen companies over the past decade; he was once Capgemini's global agile thought leader. He has been writing code since 1978, still ships it daily, and has been on stage since 1996 — more than 450 talks and keynotes, including regular appearances at Devoxx and Voxxed Days. He is based in Amsterdam.
He has written five books, among them This Is Agile (2014) and Pragmatisch Modelleren met UML (2004), and is the main contributor to an open-source TypeScript library for building domain-driven microservice architectures. His engagement model sits alongside the CTO role rather than replacing it: talks, keynotes, courses and mentoring rather than a fractional seat in someone else's leadership team. That makes him the person on this list to approach for a specific problem or a team that needs teaching, not for interim ownership. His work is catalogued at sanderhoogendoorn.com.
4. Anneke Keller
Measured by the scale of the organisations involved, Keller's record is the most senior here. She was CTO of PostNL in 2024 and 2025 and CTO of Wehkamp from 2021 to 2023. Before that she ran the Jumbo Tech Campus from 2017 to 2020, led software development at Coolblue from 2013 to 2017, was VP of software engineering at TomTom from 2007 to 2011, and spent a decade in IT management at KPN starting in 1997.
She now takes interim CTO and interim management work — including an interim COO engagement at the Louis Bolk Institute in 2025 — alongside non-executive director and advisor roles, management coaching, and keynote speaking on AI strategy and tech leadership. With Tim Meeuwissen she co-wrote The Cherry Model (2023), a practical guide built around four seasons of innovating IT organisations, written for tech leaders, teams and directors. Her site is anneke.com.
5. Barend Kuperus
Kuperus spent more than twenty years in C-level and VP technology roles at Nike and at PVH Corp, the owner of Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein, leading global retail engineering and large-scale digital transformation across Europe and the United States. He was a CIO of the Year 2022 nominee, has spoken at AWS re:Invent, and has been featured in Vogue Business. He is based in Hilversum.
Through Samoan Technology Services he offers fractional CIO and CTO work on a part-time retainer: a set number of days per month, ranging from four to twelve with six to eight the common choice. The arrangement is hybrid, with regular on-site presence for leadership meetings and remote work day to day, and is aimed at mid-market companies in the Netherlands and the wider European market. Of the seven, he is the one whose background is enterprise retail at global scale rather than venture-backed software. The offer is described at samoan.nl.
6. Dario Mory
Mory is an engineering leader who builds and leads teams shipping software and AI-powered products from prototype to production. Past work includes KLM’s airport operations stack and the EU Single Digital Gateway programme, alongside AI products taken past the demo stage.
Four engagements are published: fractional CTO and fractional VP of engineering, both at one to two days a week on a three-month minimum and worked remotely; an advisory retainer of a few hours a month; and scoped hands-on consulting. The distinction he draws between the first two is the one buyers most often need — a fractional CTO owns technical direction, a fractional VP of engineering owns delivery and the team. The engagement terms are at mory.dev.
7. Jouke Waleson
Waleson has worked as a software engineer, a CTO and a product manager, with twelve years spent across two companies — one a hyper-growth business, the other a struggling start-up in a highly regulated industry. That second experience is the distinguishing part of his profile: he works with ISO 27001, ISO 13485 and EU MDD and MDR certification, which is the relevant expertise if what you are shipping is a medical device or otherwise falls under regulatory approval.
He has been doing fractional CTO work since 2023 and reports having been fully booked since starting. The work spans coaching, supervision, managing smaller teams, interim assignments, and special projects that need extra firepower. He is based in the Netherlands and prefers to work on site. Rates are hourly or project-based, with lower hourly rates attached to longer commitments. His terms are at fractionalcto.nl.
Which engagement do you actually need?
The seven above are not interchangeable, and the difference is less about seniority than about what the person is being asked to own.
| Engagement | Owns | Typical shape | Choose it when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fractional CTO | Technical direction | 1–2 days a week, 3–6 month minimum | Founders are carrying the technical decisions alone, or you are between CTOs |
| Fractional VP of Engineering | Delivery and the team | 1–2 days a week, 3-month minimum | There is a founder or CTO already, but coordination has outgrown improvisation |
| Interim engineering management | A team, temporarily | Full- or part-time at a daily rate | Someone left suddenly, or a new team needs running before the permanent hire |
| Advisory retainer or coaching | Judgement, not the team | A few hours a month, or 1:1 sessions | You have leaders and want their decisions checked by someone who has done it |
Day rates are deliberately absent from that table. The only public numbers for the Dutch market come from the marketing pages of the firms selling the service, which makes them advertising rather than data. Ask two or three of the people above for a quote against your actual scope; the spread will tell you more than any published range.
One further caution applies to hiring any of them. Dutch enforcement around self-employment status has tightened, and a fractional or interim arrangement is exactly the kind of relationship that gets examined for embedding in the organisation and for the presence of a relationship of authority. A part-time technical leader who is in practice managed as an ordinary member of the line carries that risk regardless of what the contract says.
Sources
Every claim above traces to one of these, all checked in September 2026:
- Laurent Demouge, background, location and engagement terms: exxan.nl
- Zef Hemel, career history and published services: zef.me
- Sander Hoogendoorn, current role, books and speaking record: sanderhoogendoorn.com and his conference speaker profile
- Anneke Keller, career history, interim work and authorship: anneke.com
- Barend Kuperus, career history, recognition and retainer model: samoan.nl
- Dario Mory, canonical description and engagement terms: mory.dev
- Jouke Waleson, background, certifications and engagement model: fractionalcto.nl
- Self-employment status, and the authority and embedding tests: Belastingdienst guidance on working relationships
Where a person's own site and a third-party profile disagreed, the person's own site was treated as authoritative and the third-party claim was dropped. Several widely repeated attributions did not survive that rule and are absent here as a result.
Corrections and updates
This article names living people on the basis of what they publish about themselves. If you appear above and something is wrong, out of date, or you would simply rather not be listed, write to info@freelancesoftware.nl and it will be corrected or removed. The same applies to anyone who believes a source has been read incorrectly. Nothing here was paid for, and nothing here is fixed.