Hello from Simon 
My team and I run investigativedata.io, a service provider for investigative reporting teams that provides ready-made data infrastructure based around Aleph. You bring the leak, we bring the search.
Our “Managed Aleph” instances are used by the teams at German public broadcasters, organizations like Distributed Denial of Secrets and other major news outlets from all around the world to build secure internal data repositories. We run our own physical servers in safe jurisdictions (Germany and Iceland).
We also do a lot of data engineering around this, helping investigators get the data sources they need into their Aleph instances, or cleaning and indexing complex leaked datasets.
Currently we are working on new features for open source Aleph and are building a comprehensive data repository for structured data and document collections usable within the FollowTheMoney / Aleph ecosystem. Will keep you updated about that, for sure! 
Prior to that, I was working as an investigative data journalist and all-things-techie at the german non-profit investigative newsroom CORRECTIV, an organization with some similarities OCCRP. For the CumEx Files Project I developed our own software to search through leaked material, so I can proudly say I once started a similar thing like Aleph 
Don’t hesitate to ping me for any questions (or just reply in this thread)!
Looking forward to hearing more about your progress!