Senior data and AI leadership, hired directly

I’m Sandro Pugliese. I’ve built and run data organizations at Goldman Sachs, TelevisaUnivision, and AXS. Now I do that work for your company directly: platform architecture, cloud cost control, governance, AI enablement, and the delivery discipline that makes all of it predictable.

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• 15+ years leading data and analytics organizations
• Eight figures in annualized cloud and operational savings
• Delivery orgs turned around to hit 95%+ of their commitments
• 3 companies co-founded, 3 exits

Why one advisor

A large consultancy sells you a pyramid: partners who sell the work, managers who coordinate it, and junior staff who learn on your budget. I work alone. You get the person who actually ran these platforms, on every call, writing every deliverable.

That model works because the work is senior work. Deciding whether your warehouse spend is buying anything. Telling you which AI initiative will die in pilot. Restructuring a delivery process so your roadmap dates mean something. All of it is senior work, and it needs someone who has done it inside the building more than once.

What I do

Seven practice areas, all in service of one thing: a data and AI platform that delivers business outcomes, not activity.

1. Data strategy and architecture: the target state, the roadmap, and the platform design to get there. GCP specialization, BigQuery first.
2. Platform audit and cost management: find out what your platform actually costs, why, and what to cut. I’ve removed over $9MM/yr from one company’s data spend.
3. Data engineering and operations: pipelines, environments, CI/CD, observability, data quality. The plumbing that decides whether anything else works.
4. Governance, privacy, and security: PII inventory, access control, catalogs, lineage, and compliance across GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, HIPAA, and SOC 2.
5. AI architecture and enablement: agentic systems, LLMOps, evals, and the data readiness work that decides whether AI produces anything. Every recommendation matched to the business need and to what your organization can run.
6. Analytics and reporting: KPI standardization, dashboards executives actually use, and instrumentation you can trust end to end.
7. Engineering leadership and delivery management: the delivery system I’ve deployed at 3 companies, built for flow efficiency and forecastable work.

How we can work together

Four engagement shapes, from a bounded first project to an embedded executive seat:

• Platform audit: fixed scope, a few weeks, a ranked findings report and a roadmap you own.
• Cost reduction: I find the waste in your cloud and data spend, then implement the fixes with your team.
• Ongoing advisory: a standing retainer for architecture decisions, vendor calls, and hard tradeoffs.
• Fractional CDO / SVP Data: I run your data function part-time, build the org, and hand it over.

Details on all four: How I work.

Who you’d be working with

SVP Data at AXS through 2026, where I founded the data function and grew it to a 30-50 person org. Before that, 4 years as VP Data Engineering at TelevisaUnivision and 5 years leading data for Marcus by Goldman Sachs. Before that, a founder, 3 times, always on the technology and product side.

More on the About page.

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Tell me what’s broken, or what you’re trying to build. I read and answer everything myself.