Mark Christiaens

Seasoned engineering lead.

Experience in a multitude of domains such as VHDL/SystemVerilog language tooling, event processing, distributed storage & backup, video coding, etc. Combines deep hands-on, technical knowledge with a track record of leading teams that deliver industrial-grade software. Following my PhD, I spent a career in start-ups/scale-ups and love building things together with talented and motivated colleagues.

Founder at Belsimple (2026-04 – Present)

Solo-build of a SaaS application (belsimple.be) for tracking R&D time under the Belgian Belspo tax-exemption scheme. Seeking the limits of agentic coding.

VP Operations, Freelance at Sigasi (2018-09 – 2026-05)

Leading a 10-person international engineering team building an IDE for digital chip design (VHDL, SystemVerilog).

• Led architectural migration from Eclipse to VS Code, delivering a modern LSP-based product
• Shipped SystemVerilog and UVM support, significantly expanding the addressable market
• Doubled team size while maintaining velocity; achieved >90% annual license renewal rate

Senior Developer at NGData (2016-03 – 2018-08)

Customer data platform processing events originating from millions of customer profiles using large-scale ETL pipelines.

• Implemented asynchronous cross-cluster replication for offloading long-running analytics jobs
• Designed multi-configuration support enabling parallel A/B experimentation on live clusters
• Prototyped a DSL for pipeline configuration using the Xtext language framework

Consultant Developer at Amplidata (HGST/Western Digital) (2012-02 – 2016-01)

Petabyte-scale, erasure-coded object storage, distributing coded data across thousands of disks in multiple data centers.

• Ongoing core development of the central storage daemon in OCaml with LWT for cooperative concurrency
• Hand-tuned erasure codec in assembly for maximum throughput on commodity hardware
• Markov-modeled storage backend durability to quantify data loss probability
• Prototyped next-generation storage components in Haskell

Expert Research Engineer at Sigasi (2010-08 – 2012-01)

Reimplemented the IDE core on top of Xtext, a framework for programming languages and DSLs.

Principal Software Engineer at Symantec (2007-01 – 2010-06)

Enterprise backup product (PureDisk) with deduplication, storing all backup data on disk.

• Quadrupled storage capacity of the central component from 32 TB to 128 TB
• SOAP unit-test framework for the business logic layer

Post-Doctoral Researcher at Ghent University (2003-01 – 2006-12)

• Led hardware implementation of a scalable video decoder on FPGA. Coordinated a group of 4 PhD students.
• Managed multi-partner research project (IWT RESUME).

PhD in Applied Sciences, Computer Science – Ghent University (1997-09 – 2002-12)

Master in Computer Science, Computer Architecture – Ghent University (1992-09 – 1997-12)