Engineering platforms, empowering people. A Day with Floris van den Hoogen

Floris van den Hoogen is not your average engineer, unless your average engineer bikes to the train station in the morning, delivers cutting-edge Azure and Openshift solutions by day, and bakes wood-fired pizza by night. As a Platform Engineer within Sopra Steria’s Digital Platform Services business line, Floris leads with passion, precision, and just a bit of magic.His day begins early, catching the train with laptop in hand and a clear head. The morning commute is a chance to dive into deep work, coding, scripting, or fine-tuning infrastructure plans, all before most people have made their first coffee. Once at the office, the atmosphere shifts to collaboration, with daily stand-ups, team banter, and refinement sessions that keep things moving and morale high.

Floris is more than a technical expert. He also serves as the Track Lead for Infrastructure within the Applications business line, running knowledge-sharing sessions, hosting internal workshops, and speaking at industry events like Experts Live Netherlands. He's a natural communicator who makes complex tech not just understandable but exciting. His latest talk? A demo of Liquibase in Azure Kubernetes using Entra ID, no passwords, tokens, or certificates required!

He’s also deeply committed to improving how teams work together. Whether he's setting up a Terraform module library for over 100 development teams or running a whiteboard session to troubleshoot issues, Floris fosters open, safe spaces where innovation thrives. His leadership style is based on trust, transparency and the occasional gummy bear, literally. One legendary feel-good moment saw his team return the favour after years of his eccentric gift-giving with a surprise mountain of presents.

Beyond work, Floris is just as active. He’s a long-distance runner, gym-goer and pizza enthusiast, with a flair for local ingredients and a soft spot for his cat. In his downtime, you’ll find him tinkering with his home server, playing video games or diving into cybersecurity news with bots he built himself. When vulnerabilities pop up, Floris is often the first to flag them, and the first to act.

He’s also developed a sharp ability to spot potential issues across interconnected systems, earning him the tongue-in-cheek team title of “the guy who breaks things, even when he didn’t”. It’s all part of being the go-to person when challenges arise.

If you ask him to describe his job in one line, he'll simply say: "It’s a kind of magic." And for anyone looking to combine purpose, passion, and a good dose of fun, working with people like Floris might just be the perfect spell.