Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands
A strategic and people-centric Engineering Manager whose experience spans academia, startups, and large enterprises. I thrive on creating environments where engineers can do their best work. I have successfully built and scaled numerous engineering teams, mentored engineers into leadership roles, and transformed team culture to significantly improve satisfaction and inclusion. While I have a strong technical background in highly available, data-intensive systems, my primary focus is on translating technical strategy into tangible results. This includes leading teams to deliver critical product goals, optimizing processes for predictable delivery, and fostering the cross-functional collaboration required to solve complex business challenges. My key leadership accomplishments include: - Team Building & Cultural Transformation: Successfully built entire teams from the ground up, mentored multiple engineers into leadership positions, and demonstrably improved team satisfaction, inclusion, and pride through targeted initiatives. - Strategic Delivery & Turnaround: Rescued and delivered a critical, late-stage project valued at €6.6 million. Consistently achieved over 80% of quarterly goals by implementing data-driven planning and robust execution processes. - Fiscal & Strategic Influence: Achieved multi-million euro cost savings by successfully challenging a planned vendor-based migration, advocating instead for an open-source solution that avoided a costly and lengthy implementation. - Modernization & Platform Leadership: Spearheaded major technical initiatives, including the replatforming of core user experiences, the migration to modern API-driven architectures, and the successful decommissioning of legacy systems.
Spearheaded engineering efforts across two critical domains—Order Platform and Identity Access Management —leading a total of five distinct teams over a three-year period. Successfully navigated complex technical challenges and diverse team structures, fostering a culture of high performance, continuous learning, and predictable delivery. Key Achievements & Leadership Impact - Key Product Deliveries: Successfully replatformed the user Account Settings experience across web and mobile. Championed the adoption of passwordless authentication (OTP, Passkeys), leading the successful decommissioning of legacy password systems. - Technical & Platform Leadership: Orchestrated the migration of raw order data access to a modern, flexible API-driven architecture. Spearheaded initiatives that significantly improved CI/CD pipelines and developer productivity in a large-scale monorepo. - Cross-Functional Influence: Excelled at delivering key objectives in a highly interdependent environment, successfully navigating complex organizational structures to drive results without direct authority. - Predictable Execution & Delivery across the org: Established robust, data-driven planning processes using Jira Roadmaps and EazyBI dashboards, consistently delivering over 80% of quarterly goals. - Culture & Team Empowerment: Dramatically improved key 360° feedback scores for team pride, inclusion, and satisfaction. Fostered a vibrant learning culture by securing a dedicated learning budget and driving the adoption of Personal Development Plans (PDPs). - Talent Development & Mentorship: Successfully led and grew diverse, multi-disciplinary teams (Mobile, UX, Platform), promoting engineers into leadership roles and acting as a key ambassador for internal career growth.
- Set up a new team in inventory domain, by hiring full time employees and consultants. Handed over the team and moved into another domain. - Focused on creating a platform team that serves all product teams for common problems, such as API Gateway, Common Observability, CICD pipelines and cloud/on-prem agnostic deployment patterns. - Inner-sourced members of platform team from colleagues across other teams and domains. - Created team vision, mission and identity through remote workshops and offline events. - Leading cross team discussions for technical solutions that involves multiple teams across multiple domains. - Closing the gap between product and engineering by creating collaboration methods. - Promoting engineering best practices to the teams.
- Responsible for inventory management of IKEA stores and warehouses. - Maintaining and expanding an existing inventory management solution that integrates with legacy systems. - Delivered new features to unlock inventory data. - Introduced Golang for new services. - Frequent pair programming to improve adoption and velocity. - Simplified existing solution by revising over-engineered parts and improving automation. - Identified bottlenecks, discussed with the team and created stories to tackle the issues. - Collaborated with team to find solutions that are maintainable and provide business value. - Mentored other developers to learn and grow. - Introduced RFC process to discuss ideas with 20+ developers across 3 teams. - Pioneered knowledge sharing sessions.
• Leading the development of traffic enforcement software Puls. • Organic team of 4. Team size temporarily grew to 10 with contractors and external teams. • Main challenge is to ship a late project to the customer with minimal impact to existing customers • Delivered a project worth €6.6 million. Project was late more than a year and original authors left the company with little documentation and knowledge transfer • Working closely with PM to prioritize features, bugs and chores • Collaborated with upper management about project status and timeline • Setting up production environment (Kubernetes on premise) and getting customer support ready • Monitoring system behavior, creating bug and chore tickets • Refine tickets into simple tasks for team members to understand and pick up • Guiding team members via discussions and reviews • Defined a new architecture to simplify existing system to be extensible to customer requirements • Creating a team culture by discussing best practices
• Developed backend and infrastructure of speeding violation processing. • Architecture is microservices written in Go, using MySQL and Postgres as persistency. Cloud (GCP, Azure), baremetal and Windows is supported. • Worked in a team of 8 backend developers. Standardized code base and tools, mentored others, setup integration test framework, maintained infrastructure, environments (dev, test, acc) and deployed production Kubernetes cluster on premise. • Challenges: Complex architecture with little documentation. Low code quality. No integration tests. No monitoring. Legacy CI/CD. Time pressure for delivery. • Highlights: Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes, Go, C, Gherkin, Computer Networking, Firewalls, OpenVPN, Jenkins
• Developed backend of the micro investment application in Go. • Architecture was microservices on AWS platform primarily written in Go with MySQL for persistency. Gherkin/Cucumber test framework and 4 environments (dev, test, acc, prd) • Author or maintainer of 10+ micro services. • Worked in a team of 5 backend, 4 mobile developers and the CTO in Agile/Scrum way. Several POs and UX designer were stakeholders. • You write it, you own it. Responsible for production issues.
• Worked in Cluster Management group. • Utilized Go, Python, C++ and Bash for development. • Developed backend of microservice orchestration tool Hashicorp's Nomad. • Responsible for Cluster Persistence, utilized Hashicorp's Consul for KV store and Discovery Service. • Developed in-house Consul C++ client. • Migrated previous Service Discovery infrastructure to Docker and Kubernetes. • Supported installation in multiple cloud providers: AWS, GCP, Azure and On-Premise