Sofia
Senior Advisor, Procurement
European defence acquisition, regulatory navigation, and the architecture of collaborative funding.
Sofia is the firm's senior advisor on European defence acquisition and procurement. Over the course of her career she has counselled on multi-billion-euro programs spanning armoured vehicles, airborne ISR platforms, and major maritime systems, with a particular focus on ensuring that complex technical requirements are translatable into compliant procurement language under national and EU regulatory frameworks.
Earlier in her career, she worked within national procurement agencies in Southern Europe and on secondment to European institutional bodies overseeing collaborative defence programs. That dual perspective—both buyer and supranational referee—gives her practice an unusual ability to anticipate where procurement processes will stall, and how to design programs that survive contact with reality.
She brings particularly deep familiarity with the European Defence Fund, PESCO project structures, and Article 346 derogations, as well as the more granular procedural mechanics of national procurement law in several member states. She has supported both defence primes seeking market entry and ministries designing competitive procurement processes.
At Aethelgard, Sofia provides strategic counsel to clients seeking to align product roadmaps with the procurement priorities of European ministries of defence, and to ministries seeking independent review of major acquisition decisions before they become irreversible.