David Santamaria

Engineering Leader / Tech Lead

Vitoria-Gasteiz, Basque Country, Spain

About

Senior Engineering Manager with 10+ years of experience managing individuals who enjoy helping out teams and individuals succeed. Supporting and growing the individuals that work surrounding me. I value and encourage teamwork, a continuous improvement mindset, delivering value to customers, commitment, empowerment, and humility. I have comprehensive experience in leading and working with engineering teams in the architecture, specification, and implementation of complex, highly scalable, and performant systems. I am a Software engineer interested in software analysis, architecture, and development. The Web has been my focus. I love to build things with quality, from the conception to the deployment. I take the software that I write very seriously while having an extreme passion for being the best I can be at doing what I love to do.

Experience

  • Engineering Manager at Wikimedia Foundation
    Jan 2025 - Present Β· 1 yr 6 mos

    As the Engineering Manager for the Abstract Wikipedia team at Wikimedia Foundation, to create a language-independent version of Wikipedia.

  • Senior Engineering Manager at Toptal
    Sep 2021 - Dec 2024 Β· 3 yrs 4 mos

    𝐑𝐨π₯𝐞: As a Senior Engineering Manager at Toptal, I led a dynamic organization of up to 20 people distributed in four teams, including four teams of senior engineers. I focused on driving impactful initiatives and fostering a learning and continuous improvement culture. I managed Toptal’s internship program and led the Developer Intelligence team, which played critical roles in enhancing the company’s engineering capabilities and operational efficiency. ➀ Leadership & Program Development: Spearheaded Toptal's internship program for the talent network and prospective candidates, graduating nearly 100 participants and establishing the program as a primary entry point to the engineering department. ➀ Mentorship & Learning Pathways: Managed four teams dedicated to coaching apprentices while developing internal tools and products. Created six distinct learning paths and introduced a comprehensive system for evaluating and tracking candidate progress. ➀ Led Developer Intelligence Team focused on providing insights and metrics, empowering engineering to make data-driven decisions. Shipped: ➀ Incident Management System: Developed an incident management system that significantly improved response times and provided metrics to help teams reduce incidents. ➀ Performance System Optimization: Enhanced the performance management system, reducing feedback and performance review costs while increasing the volume of feedback and employee satisfaction. Other achievements: ➀ Part of the High Potential program inside of Toptal.

  • Senior Engineering Manager at Cloudbeds
    Oct 2020 - Sep 2021 Β· 1 yr

    𝐑𝐨π₯𝐞: Senior Engineering Manager at Cloudbeds. Working on the distribution vertical, leading the Distributed Systems team and the Channel manager team. ➀ Lead two teams of 9 software engineers, the distribution systems team in charge of making systems scalable, driving the engineering team into the microservices architecture; and the channel manager team distributing our inventory along +300 online booking channels. ➀ Responsibilities include technical product definition and mid-term/long-term vision, technological leadership, delivery and team growth, team health, and individuals progression. ➀ Partner with the leadership to create the engineering department’s career path and drive the engineering team’s calibration. π’π‘π’π©π©πžπ: ➀ Drive the technology transformation into microservices. ➀ Along that time, the channel manager team was able to attain a premier partnership with Booking.com. ➀ Partner with Google to be part of the Google Hotel Search pilot.

  • Engineering Manager at Cabify
    Apr 2019 - Oct 2020 Β· 1 yr 7 mos

    π“πžπœπ‘ π’π­πšπœπ€: Golang, Redis, MySQL, NSQ, gRPC, Google Cloud Platform. 𝐑𝐨π₯𝐞: Senior Engineering manager at Cabify. Working on the Match team. ➀ Lead the creation of the Maps & Routes team. ➀ Lead a group of 7 software engineers collaborating with product and data science to improve our marketplace. ➀ Responsibilities include technical product definition and long-term/mid-term vision, technological leadership, team growth, team health, and individuals progression. π’π‘π’π©π©πžπ: We were in charge of the matcher, matching thousands of riders and drivers per matching round. ➀ Lead the creation of the Maps & Routes squad responsible for delivering the tools for providing routes and ETAs solutions for Cabify. ➀ That team reduced the operational cost of Cabify on other map services by more than a half in less than one year. By that time, the operating cost of mapping services was one of the company’s highest expenses. ➀ Ship a tool to replace Google maps on calculations of ETAs based on a machine learning model that predicts ETAs. Later we extend that tool to replace Google Maps on routes calculation.

  • Senior Engineering Manager at eBay
    Apr 2016 - Apr 2019 Β· 3 yrs 1 mo

    π“πžπœπ‘ π’π­πšπœπ€: Java, Spring Boot, Kotlin, Oracle, Kafka, Google Cloud Platform. 𝐑𝐨π₯𝐞: Tech Lead at Stubhub(an eBay company) worked on several teams across the company, like Delivery & Fulfillment, international, Buyer Experience, and Financial Services. ➀ Leading multiple teams of 10+ software engineers collaborating with product, design, and business to deliver delightful user experiences. ➀ Responsibilities for this role include product definition and vision, technical leadership, and team management. π’π‘π’π©π©πžπ: ➀ Lead the transformation of multiple services into Cloud Native Services. ➀ Drive the monolith extraction into microservices and bringing them into the cloud. 𝐎𝐭𝐑𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐜𝐑𝐒𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬: ➀ Member of the SDLC Committee of the company. ➀ Organizer of the Engineering culture team inside Stubhub.