Datamaran has appointed Bert Sinnema as chief technology officer, tasking him with leading the company's global engineering and product organization as it expands artificial intelligence across its governance and risk platform. The appointment, announced September 4, consolidates product vision, technology architecture, and delivery under a single role at a time when the company is repositioning from ESG issue management toward a broader AI-powered governance offering.
Sinnema will be based at Datamaran's Leeuwarden office in the Netherlands and will oversee teams that include the company's engineering hub in Valencia, Spain. His mandate covers the full technical roadmap - from strategy and architecture through development and execution - giving him authority over both what gets built and how the organization builds it.
A platform shift toward AI-driven governance
Datamaran's software helps organizations assess evolving risks, regulatory requirements, and stakeholder expectations. The company is now pushing AI deeper into that workflow, using it to turn complex inputs into information that supports business decisions. Sinnema's arrival signals an acceleration of that shift, with a focus on ensuring the underlying platform can handle a risk and regulatory environment that continues to change in scope and complexity.
Bringing product and engineering leadership together under the CTO role places responsibility for strategy, architecture, and delivery within a single organization. For product development teams, that structure reduces the friction between roadmap decisions and the technical capacity to execute them - a dynamic that matters when the product itself is being redefined around AI for Product Development.
Engineering leadership built across startups and scale-ups
Sinnema brings more than 12 years of product engineering leadership experience across startups, scaling technology businesses, and established software platforms. His background spans engineering, cybersecurity, and AI.
Most recently, he served as vice president of engineering at Eye Security, a European cybersecurity company, where he built the product and engineering organization from the ground up and expanded its international, multi-hub team threefold. During his tenure, Eye Security reached a €60 million Series C financing round. Before that, he spent more than three years at HackerOne, advancing to director of engineering and leading teams focused on security products used to identify and manage software vulnerabilities.
Earlier in his career, Sinnema founded secure communications and privacy platform SmartLockr and served as its CTO. He bootstrapped the business, expanded it across three countries, and participated in Microsoft's Ventures Accelerator in Berlin. That combination of founder and engineering leadership experience gives him a background in building technology organizations at an early stage and managing them as operational requirements grow.
What leadership expects from the new CTO
"Bert has spent his career building engineering organizations from the ground up and scaling them through some of the most demanding environments, including as a founder himself," Datamaran CEO and co-founder Marjella Lecourt-Alma said. She pointed to his experience developing teams, technology, and organizational culture as particularly relevant as Datamaran broadens its platform beyond ESG issue management.
For Datamaran, the transition increases the importance of coordinating product development with the technical infrastructure required to process risk, regulatory, and stakeholder information at scale. Speed alone is not the goal. The platform must translate increasingly complex inputs into usable insights while maintaining a product architecture that can evolve alongside customer requirements.
Why this matters for product development professionals
Sinnema's appointment is a case study in how companies restructure engineering leadership when AI becomes central to the product. Consolidating product vision and engineering execution under one CTO - rather than splitting them across separate roles - reflects a bet that tighter integration between strategy and delivery will matter more as the platform grows more complex. For product leaders and engineers, the signal is clear: when AI moves from a feature to the core of a product, the organizational design often needs to follow. The AI Learning Path for CTOs addresses exactly this intersection of technical strategy and team structure.
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