About

Hey, I’m Damien. French, but I’ve been living in Amsterdam since 2015.

By day I’m a Senior Platform Engineer at Kaiko.ai, working on the infrastructure behind healthcare AI products. Kubernetes, multi-cloud, the kind of stuff that quietly keeps things running. I’ve been doing platform and SRE work for about a decade. If you want the full timeline, it’s all at damien.plenard.me/resume.

I’m neurodivergent, which shapes a lot of how I work and think. The deep dives, the strong opinions, the need to fully understand something before I feel okay touching it.

I have a thing for theme parks. Disneyland Paris is basically a regular trip at this point, and Efteling is one of my favourite places in Europe that most people outside the Netherlands don’t know about. I try to visit as many parks across Europe as I can.

When I’m not doing that, I’m usually gaming. I have a soft spot for cozy games (Stardew Valley is a classic for a reason, Animal Crossing too), and I keep coming back to Pokemon, Zelda, and Overwatch. On the Switch I also spend way too much time on Mario Kart, Mario Party, Mario platformers, and Splatoon. On the PC side, I’ve put a lot of hours into Helldivers 2, Deep Rock Galactic, and Arc Raiders. I used to stream on Twitch a few times a week and somehow ended up with a couple thousand followers. That’s paused for now, life got fuller.

Speaking of which, I’m a dad. That’s probably the most important thing on this page.