Datum Consulting NZ

After GaraSTEM, I needed something different. Not another startup. Not another corporate suit. Something in between - where I could write code at enterprise scale but still move fast. Datum was that.

Datum ships engineers to clients in Vietnam and the Philippines. Banking. Insurance. Customer data platforms. The kind of systems where a bad deploy affects real people's money. I've worked on digital banking APIs, serverless driver platforms, big data pipelines with medallion architecture, MLOps platforms with SageMaker. The stack changes every project. The standards don't.

The systems I touch have been running for years. Legacy code, accumulated debt, documentation from people who left long ago. My job isn't to rewrite everything - it's to make incremental improvements that actually matter. Move a slow query here. Refactor a module there. Ship a feature that someone's been waiting on for months.

What KPMG taught me - lead with understanding, not technology - applies here every day. I don't just write code. I sit in on client calls. I read the business requirements between the lines. I ask why before I ask how. The engineers who've been at Datum for decades taught me the rest: the best code isn't the cleverest. It's the one that gets replaced easily when requirements change. Write boring code. Ship reliable software. Let someone else rewrite it in two years.

Datum is where everything converged. KPMG gave me the framework - understand the problem before building the solution. GaraSTEM gave me the speed - ship fast, iterate faster, don't overthink. Enterprise consulting is where those two lessons meet.