olivier

engineering leader

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