Founder & Principal
Three decades inside enterprise IT. Now on your side of the table.
Christopher Moskowitz founded VanDien.io after thirty years building and running technology organizations in financial services. He most recently ran engineering for Jefferies, a full service capital markets, investment bank, and before that was Chief Technology Officer at two premier New York alternative investment organizations. Underneath the titles the work never changed: decide what to build, what to buy, what to retire, and be able to prove to a regulator that you were right.
What that buys you
Experience is only worth something if it transfers.
Six things the last thirty years produced that matter to a firm of a few hundred people.
Scale you will not outgrow
A 55-person global engineering organization supporting more than 16,000 endpoints on an annual budget of $15M to $20M, reorganized into five specialist groups and measurably faster for it. Whatever size your environment is, its failure modes have already been met at ten times the scale.
The buyer’s side of the table
Twenty years of RFPs, contract negotiations and vendor due diligence, including rebuilding one firm’s entire IT function out of a fully outsourced arrangement. The proposal in front of you is a document type already read several hundred times, from the side that had to live with it.
Regulated from the beginning
Security and governance programmes built to the standard that regulators and investigators apply, delivered alongside PwC, ACA and outside counsel, then defended in person in investor due-diligence sessions. Your insurer’s questionnaire is a gentler version of the same exercise.
Modernization actually finished
SCCM to Intune, Entra ID and conditional access across a global bank. Server provisioning automated across on-premise, AWS and Azure through one self-service platform. These are migrations carried to completion in production, not reference architectures.
AI deployed, not demonstrated
Azure OpenAI and Microsoft 365 Copilot introduced across a 16,000-endpoint firm, alongside a working lab running GPU-accelerated local inference and agentic systems next to the commercial models. The advice comes from operating both and being loyal to neither.
Tested, not rehearsed
Most continuity plans are never used. This one was, in circumstances nobody plans for, when a $4 billion fund became the subject of an investigation that was front-page news internationally. The architecture held. Everything the authorities required was produced without operations stopping, and months of work alongside investigators followed. The same instinct later moved roughly 8,000 people to remote working in a matter of weeks, while comparable firms were still deliberating.
The route here
Thirty years, and only one of them spent on a slide.
Product and quality first, then infrastructure, then the whole function, then back to the code. Each layer is what makes the advice at the layer above it specific.
VanDien.io LLC
Founder & Principal
Technology advisory across infrastructure, security, vendor selection and AI adoption for organizations in the New York metro, plus four commercial applications designed, engineered, signed and shipped through the Microsoft Store and the App Store.
Aiden Technologies
Senior Director
Built and led the technical account management function at a cybersecurity company from nothing, co-managed customer success engineering, and closed the loop between what customers actually needed and what the product team built next.
Jefferies
Global Head of Windows Engineering
A global engineering organization of 55 people supporting more than 16,000 endpoints across capital markets, investment banking and corporate functions, on a budget of $15M to $20M. Owned the whole Microsoft portfolio, covering strategy, engineering, vendor relationships and contracts, and led the firm through modern-workplace transformation and its first production AI deployments.
Deerfield Management
Chief Technology Officer
Recruited on the strength of the Level Global wind-down. Took a fully outsourced IT function and rebuilt it in-house as a secure hybrid cloud estate across New York, Switzerland, China and Rye Brook, with 24×7 SOC monitoring, a governance and continuity programme, and a vendor lifecycle run on real due-diligence data rather than on references.
Level Global Investors
Chief Technology Officer
Recruited to institutionalize the technology function of a $4 billion hedge fund. Built dual-data-center high availability and a firm-wide data warehouse spanning order management, fund accounting and analytics. The design was later tested in circumstances nobody plans for, when the firm became the subject of an investigation that was front-page news internationally. It held. Everything the authorities required was produced from the secondary site, and the business did not lose a day. Months of work alongside investigators and counsel followed, then the orderly wind-down of the fund.
Internet-era technology firms
Product management & QA leadership
The first decade went on the other half of the problem: defining what a product was supposed to do, then running the quality organizations responsible for proving that it did. It is why an assessment here asks what a system is for before it asks what it is running.
Why an advisor still ships software
The recommendations come from someone who is still building.
Four commercial applications, taken alone from architecture through implementation, security design, code signing, store certification and release, in C++, C#, .NET, React and TypeScript, and Swift. It is an unusual thing for an advisory firm to be able to say, and it is the reason the advice arrives with an opinion rather than a shortlist.
Built, signed and shipped
Security software, not security slideware.
FileSentinel is the scanner used during the data-discovery part of an assessment. It runs on your machines, finds what is sitting in files nobody has opened in years, and leaves nothing behind. Writing it is what keeps the advice about data exposure specific.
All four applications
Common questions
Are you the only person who would work on our engagement?
For the assessment work, yes. That is deliberate, and it is most of what the report is worth. For delivery at scale, specialists are brought in by name, scoped to a defined piece of work, and introduced to you before they touch anything. Building teams that way, blending permanent staff with specialist consultants, was most of the last twenty years.
Your background is financial services. We are not a hedge fund.
The regulator changes; the failure modes do not. An untested backup, a flat network, a vendor contract nobody read and an identity estate full of leavers behave identically whether the auditor is the SEC or your largest client. What financial services buys you is a very low tolerance for hand-waving.
Why leave an executive role to do this?
Because the interesting part of the job was always the decision rather than the org chart, and because advice that costs a bank a seven-figure programme is often two weeks of work for a firm of two hundred people. Nobody was selling it to them at that size.
Do you still write code?
Daily. Four commercial applications for Windows, macOS and iOS, taken from architecture through code signing and store certification without a team. It is the reason the advice on this site tends to arrive with an opinion attached.
Can you act as a fractional or interim CTO?
Yes. It is the Advise engagement described on the homepage, and it is a model previously built and delivered as a service for an investment firm. Month to month, and worth cancelling the moment it stops earning its keep.
The person you speak to first is the person who does the work.
info@vandien.io · (551) 236-3191 · Ridgewood, NJ, serving the New York metro