Fractional data team, Europe and Italy
A fractional data team in your time zone
A fractional data team gives your company senior data engineering and leadership without full-time hires. I am based in Italy and work with startups and scale-ups across Europe: same working hours, English or Italian, GDPR designed in from day one. No lock-in.
What is included
- Senior data engineering: architecture, warehouse, pipelines, dashboards, in production.
- Data leadership: roadmap, priorities, and metric definitions the company agrees on.
- A weekly cadence sized to your stage, scaling up or down as the workload changes.
- GDPR-aware design: EU data residency, minimization, and retention as architecture decisions.
- Documentation and handover, so the function is yours, not rented.
It is the same build, run, handoff engagement described on the services overview, delivered at a fractional cadence for companies that do not need, or cannot yet justify, a full-time team.
How it works
We start with a data audit: your sources, your questions, what is broken and what is missing. From there we agree on a scope and a first milestone measured in answered questions, not in tools installed. I work in your Slack and your repos, in CET hours, async by default with a regular call cadence. As the function matures you choose: internalize it with your own hires, trained by me on your stack, or keep the fractional arrangement running. Either way it is built to keep working without me.
When you need it
- Your data workload is real, but it is not yet a full-time team's worth.
- You want senior-level work in your time zone, not a late-night call with another continent.
- You operate in the EU and need GDPR thought through in the architecture, not after.
- You are an Italian company that wants the work done in Italian, or a European one that wants it in English. Both work.
If you are weighing this against recruiting, read when to hire a data team. If you are a SaaS company wondering what the function should even do, start from data strategy for SaaS scale-ups.
Frequently asked questions
What is a fractional data team?
A fractional data team gives your company senior data capacity, engineering plus leadership, without full-time hires. The work is scoped as projects with clear deliverables — a working platform, reliable reporting, answered questions — and you scale that scope up or down as the business changes. It is the right shape for companies whose data workload is real but not yet a full-time team's worth.
Why does working with someone based in Europe matter?
Three practical reasons: overlap, language, and law. You get real-time collaboration in CET instead of late-evening calls with another continent. You get someone who can work in English with your team and in Italian with your stakeholders, if you have them. And you get GDPR treated as a design input from day one: EU data residency, retention, and minimization decided in the architecture, not patched on after a lawyer asks.
Do you work with companies outside Italy?
Yes. I am based in Naples, Italy and work remotely with startups and scale-ups across Europe, in English or Italian. Most collaboration is async plus a regular cadence of calls in CET working hours; if you are anywhere in Europe, we share most of the working day.
How does this differ from hiring a nearshore agency?
An agency rents you interchangeable capacity and keeps the knowledge. A fractional data team is one senior, accountable operator who designs, builds, and runs your data function on your accounts and standard tools, documents it, and trains your people. When you internalize, everything stays with you. The exit is part of the offer, not a renegotiation.
Need the whole function rather than a fractional slice? See data team as a service, or book a data audit and we will size it together.
