Who am I?

I’m Jose Coto. After years leading data teams, I’ve gone freelance.

Previously, I was the Head of Data at nebenan.de, Germany’s largest neighborhood platform, where I led two teams across analytics engineering and personalization. I’ve built data functions from the ground up twice, first at Door2door and then at nebenan.de, working the full stack from warehouse architecture to AI-ready data foundations.

Before moving into data, I studied law and political economy, a background that still shapes how I think about incentives and decision-making inside data teams.

In The Data Lead I want to cover data infrastructure, analytics engineering and what it takes to lead a data team. Right now I’m especially focused on what separates real AI-driven analytics from a confident-sounding hallucination: the documentation, semantic layers and guardrails that make AI on top of a data stack something you can actually trust. I’m also the creator of The Honest Agent, an open-source tool to run evals and check whether you can trust your AI data agents.

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And, if you have a project you think I can help you with, let’s get in touch through The Groundlayer or on LinkedIn!

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