The road so far

I joined Auto Europe to lead engineering for one of the largest car rental brokers in the world. The mandate is straightforward: build a modern engineering organization and a platform that can support the next stage of the business, while keeping the team close to the product and the customer.

It's early days here, and I'll keep this page updated as the story develops.

I joined Tymeshift as Senior Engineering Manager and stayed on through the acquisition by Zendesk, moving into the Director of Engineering role for the Workforce Management product. Across both, I managed six engineering managers and six tech leads, and grew the org from 35 to more than 90 people across several countries.

A big part of the job was making hard calls under real constraints. We retired a legacy system and built the migration plan that moved customers onto the new one, which helped push our NPS from 7.2 to 8.3 and land enterprise customers with over a thousand paid seats. We also rebuilt the roadmap and architecture to handle 10x the load without losing what made the product work for smaller teams, which supported ARR growth from $3.2M to $18M.

None of that works without the team. I ran a diversity-focused hiring push that grew representation by 30%, and put together a small innovation lab that shipped three new features and lifted adoption on our Forecast feature by 15%.

I coach engineers in the GDG London community, mostly on career growth and interview readiness. It keeps me close to what people early and mid-career are actually running into in the job market, which feeds directly back into my coaching work and this site.

I joined Tymeshift as Senior Engineering Manager, running four cross-functional teams and building out our agile ways of working from scratch. Within a year I moved into VP of Engineering, directing a team of 35 engineers and four senior managers through the company's acquisition by Zendesk.

The biggest lever was speed without chaos. Tightening our agile process cut delivery lead time by 35%, and partnering closely with sales, customer success, and support cut the backlog of pending support cases by 87% in nine months. I also acted as the engineering voice in the sales process, which helped close several enterprise deals.

On the structural side, I rebuilt our application and database integration, which cut storage costs by $50,000 a year, and created an engineering career framework so people had a clear path to grow. When the Zendesk acquisition happened, that foundation made the integration a lot smoother than it could have been.

At Devoteam I led engineering across several outsourcing engagements at once, which meant constantly switching context between teams, clients, and technical stacks. I owned hiring, backlog prioritization, and delivery planning for multiple teams in parallel.

A lot of my time went into raising the technical bar: designing reusable cloud architecture, pushing CI/CD and test automation, and coaching teams on tools and practices that were new to them. I paired that with regular 1:1s and feedback loops, because process improvements only stick if people are actually growing alongside them.

Moving to BMW Group was also my move to Lisbon and my first step fully into people management. I led a team building on a microservices architecture, acting as both engineering manager and scrum master for the group.

Day to day, that meant running the agile ceremonies, keeping stakeholders aligned on what we were building and why, and making sure the architecture stayed reusable and scalable as the product grew. I also owned onboarding, performance reviews, and hiring for the team, which is where I really started to enjoy developing people, not just code.

This was my first real taste of technical leadership. I stayed hands-on as a software engineer, mostly on a Java and Spring Boot stack with geolocation processing, but I also picked up the scrum master hat, ran code reviews, and started coaching the team on TDD and BDD.

It was less about title and more about habit: better tests, tighter code review, and agile ceremonies that actually helped instead of just filling the calendar.

Four years of building and integrating systems end to end, mostly in Java EE with jQuery and Bootstrap on top. I worked across high and low platform integrations, wrote a lot of the reference documentation myself, and ran internal training sessions to bring new engineers up to speed.

This is where I built the habits that stuck: writing things down, testing before shipping, and paying attention to the systems on both sides of an integration, not just the one I was touching.