Hello,
I’m Olivier, and let’s clear this up right away—my last name is De Meulder, but you don’t need to bother with it. Just call me Olivier, and we’ll be great. I’m currently a Senior Director of Engineering at The New York Times, where I lead teams in designing high-availability subscription and payment applications in the cloud. But it’s not just about the code—it’s also about having a strong business sense, great communication, and a touch of humor to keep things running smoothly.
Before this, I co-founded Invitation Consultants with my wife, Allison. It was an exciting eCommerce business that brought custom invitations and stationery to life. As the CTO, I built the website, handled credit card integrations, and made sure everything worked seamlessly. Running a business taught me the importance of balancing creativity with strategy—and how engineering can power both. It also gave me a deep appreciation for entrepreneurship, teamwork, and the magic of turning ideas into reality.
My journey started in Antwerp, Belgium, where I earned a Master’s in Information Services and an MBA. That combination of tech and business has been the throughline of my career, whether I was tackling challenging projects or mentoring the next generation of engineers.
In my spare time I have a long list of stuff I enjoy doing, learning and reading about. Cooking, history, skiing, large language models, the French revolution, economics, economic history, hiking, machine learning, cloud computing, The Cure, ...
Cheers,
Olivier