Pol Santamaria

Fractional CTO & Data Architect | Business strategy, product, and operational AI

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About

About Me

I am a fractional CTO and data architect for product and operational AI. My path runs from research at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) to co-founding Qbeast, a BSC spin-off that transferred patented indexing and sampling technology into commercial lakehouse platforms.

At BSC I researched NoSQL and key-value stores for scientific workloads, hierarchical storage, and approximate analytics on large multidimensional datasets. I collaborated with Intel and the Human Brain Project, and contributed work involving Alluxio and Apache Spark. A Master's in Computer Engineering and Mathematics deepened that distributed systems focus. My thesis on approximate analytics fed the same line of algorithms.

I co-founded Qbeast and served as Founding CTO for four years through pre-seed and seed. I built and led a team of about 10 engineers and shipped a SaaS product for multidimensional indexing on Delta Lake, with integrations across Databricks, Snowflake, AWS, and related open formats.

Today I lead architecture and hands-on engineering for clients such as Tameson: analytics platforms, AI agent tooling, and hybrid cloud or self hosted infrastructure. MBA from Quantic School of Business and Technology. I have spoken at AI & Big Data Expo London, Spark Meetup (Adevinta HQ, Barcelona), ICCS, and the HBP Student Conference.

Data & AI

  • BigQuery
  • Dataform
  • dbt
  • Dagster
  • Databricks
  • Delta Lake
  • Apache Flink
  • Apache Arrow
  • Hatchet
  • Pydantic AI
  • LiteLLM
  • OpenClaw
  • n8n

Infra

  • Terraform
  • GCP
  • AWS
  • Kubernetes
  • Helm
  • Virtual private servers

Work

Roles where I shipped products, led teams, and built systems.

  1. Apr 2025 to Present

    Fractional CTO

    Data & AI Engineering Services

    I lead data and AI engineering as a fractional CTO. Primary client: Tameson.

    • Built analytics on BigQuery, Dataform, and Dagster, including lineage from Dataform models into Dagster assets.
    • Centralized secrets across GitLab, Google Secret Manager, Dagster, and Hatchet.
    • Built AI skills and tools for agent systems; optimized OpenClaw for sales and customer support.
    • Managed hybrid infra with Terraform on GCP and AWS, and self hosted Kubernetes with Helm.
    • Designed trading systems on EC2 with FIX, autoscaling, and API Gateway.

  2. Feb 2020 to Feb 2024

    Founding CTO

    Qbeast

    I co-founded Qbeast and served as Founding CTO for four years, from first hire through €2.5M seed and handover.

    • Raised €520K pre-seed (Inveready, Banco Sabadell) and €2.5M seed led by Elaia, with Sabadell VC, Inveready, and Oscar Salazar.
    • Built the engineering team (about 10): designed hiring, interviews, and scorecards; hiring NPS reached the 65 to 90 range.
    • Led technical due diligence and VC analyst meetings; joined Intel Ignite in Munich.
    • Shipped a SaaS data product on AWS EKS with Delta Lake indexing, EMR, SQS, SNS, and integrations with Databricks and Snowflake.
    • Ran sales engineering for a few months: discovery on outbound booked calls, closed SEAT, and led an on site follow up and planning session.
    • Closed leads at Data & AI Summit (San Francisco), including Netflix and startups later acquired by Databricks, Google, and OpenAI, for a product line later discontinued by leadership.
    • Handed over to a new CTO and VP of Engineering; the team continued and raised further funding after my departure.

  3. Jan 2019 to Jan 2020

    Software Research Engineer

    Barcelona Supercomputing Center

    I worked on distributed computing and hierarchical storage systems at BSC.

    • Collaborated with the Intel Exascale Lab and the Human Brain Project.

  4. Dec 2016 to Dec 2018

    Junior developer / Research Engineer

    Barcelona Supercomputing Center

    I moved Big Data applications to distributed data stores at BSC.

    • Built connectors in C++, Python, and Fortran.

Speaking

  • The future of Data Lakehouses: From ingestion to consumption with open table formats and protocols AI & Big Data Expo London2023 London, UK
  • Delta Lake: Liquid Clustering Spark Meetup · Adevinta HQ2023 Barcelona, Spain
    Watch
  • Evaluating the Benefits of Key-Value Databases for Scientific Applications ICCS 20192019 Faro, Portugal
  • Big data for HPC: the Human Brain Project 2nd HBP Student Conference2018 Ljubljana, Slovenia
    Watch

Publications

Peer-reviewed papers and journals from research work. 5 papers · 1 journal

Let's Connect

Feel free to reach out for technical advice or just to chat!