If David Renaers is the voice clients hear, David Aerts is the architecture they sleep on. Two decades of building systems that can't fail — and the engineering culture that keeps them that way.
Two decades in the engine room
David Aerts started his career deep inside Telco infrastructure — Orange, then Oracle Communications — where uptime is measured in nines and a five-minute outage shows up in the press. He led integrations across NCC, BRM, and downstream billing systems, the kind of work where one wrong config can interrupt service for millions of subscribers.
That background shaped how he thinks about software: every system has failure modes, the question is whether you've found them before production has. It's not pessimism — it's the only honest way to build something that runs at 3am on a Sunday in December.
The CTO & Visionary role
At DNA Solutions, David owns the technical bar. He decides which architectures the team will defend, which ones they refuse to ship, and how engineers grow inside the company. The "visionary" part isn't a title vanity — it means looking past the contract in front of him and asking what the client's stack will need in three years, not three months.
Practically, that translates into:
- Architecture reviews on every engagement before the proposal goes out.
- An engineering culture where "I'm not sure" is a valid answer in client meetings.
- A bias toward boring, observable, recoverable systems over clever ones.
What he believes
- Modernization isn't a rewrite. Most legacy systems can be incrementally rescued — the rip-and-replace pitch is usually a salesperson's dream and an operations nightmare.
- AI changes a lot, but not the laws of distributed systems. Latency, consistency, idempotency still matter. Skipping them because there's an LLM in the loop is how you ship demos that die in production.
- The best engineers stay because the work is real. DNA's retention isn't an HR program — it's the consequence of giving people problems worth solving and clients worth respecting.
Outside the office
Brussels-based. Endless curiosity for emerging tech, especially anything that touches data infrastructure. Will happily spend a Saturday tracing why a query plan flipped between two database versions.