Bastien Boutonnet

What I do

I build and lead products, from R&D to shipped, independently, from Amsterdam and working with clients globally. I go deepest on data and AI systems, but the craft is the same wherever the hard problem is: the models, the tools and interfaces around them, and the teams that build them. Since April 2026 I've done this work on my own terms, with clients who need both the engineering and the judgement in one person.

How I got here

I didn't start in data. I trained as a cognitive neuroscientist, with a PhD at Bangor University, using brain imaging to study language and cognition, then postdoctoral research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison on how the brain recognizes objects, and at Leiden University on language comprehension and prediction. Underneath the subject matter, the work was the same thing I do now: take a messy, ambiguous question, design a way to answer it, and stay honest about what the results actually mean. In 2016 I brought that into industry as a data scientist at TravelBird, building marketing-attribution and demand-forecasting models, then as a senior data scientist at TripActions, working on NLP, recommendations, and search personalization. At Soda, I moved from building to building and leading, running the team behind its data-quality automation products, taking it from zero to shipped.

How I work

I'm at my best taking something from zero to ten, the phase where the problem is still vague, the path isn't drawn, and the job is to make a real, working thing where there wasn't one. I do that best across very different environments rather than settling into one for years; the variety is the point, and each context sharpens the next. Working independently is a deliberate choice to spend my time in that build phase: step in, set the direction, ship, and leave a team that can carry it forward.

What I care about

I care about products that are honest and legible, things people actually trust and use, built by teams who understand what they've made. Away from client work I maintain open-source data tooling, I've spoken about data and machine learning at conferences, and I build things for their own sake, including the software that runs a community radio station. If that sounds like the shape of a problem you have, get in touch.