Terramate

I joined Terramate to bring my experience of scaling teams at global unicorns to the early stages of a startup.

VP of Engineering

Getir

- Responsible for 1 tribe, 5 managers, 6 squads, 40 headcount, in 8 countries
- Mentored multiple senior ICs through the Manager path transition
- Responsible for all user-facing experiences common to all of our 9 businesses
- Owned strategic SaaS vendor relationships, driving significant cost improvements through contract right-sizing
- Technical due diligence for M&A
- Delivered significant performance and cost benefits to core services via scale-appropriate system redesigns 
- Director of Engineering for the German HQ

Leading with empathy through consolidation and the drive for operational efficiency.

Director of Engineering

- Responsible for 2 squads, 1 EM, 1 Lead, 16 headcount
- Managing remote-first teams across 7 countries
- Responsible for core services supporting over 100M registered users

Joined in a high growth phase with the objective of spinning up new teams to accelerate business.

Senior Engineering Manager

lengoo

Grew from 8 to 24 engineers in 4 teams led by EMs.

Got new Machine Translation models deployed to customers in minutes instead of days.

Partnering with Sales, we launched an API-first, fully digital experience for digital native customers that eliminated the need for 90% of human intervention. It helped us gain market share in the Nordics at a lower cost of labor.

Head Of Engineering

Europe, North America, South America, Oceania, and Asia

Travelling

Contentful

Managing the European team, while remaining an active Solutions Architect for key accounts.

Coordinated the intake of customer insights into the Product development process.

Recruited the initial San Francisco Solution Architecture team

Solutions Architect Manager

Providing technical leadership, guidance and organisational coaching to the software teams of 30+ customers, from small startups to large Fortune 500 enterprises across Europe, US and Canada.

Pre-sales technical enablement leading to faster closing times.

Post-sales technical enablement leading to lower churn and higher deal expansion rates.

Supported 30+ enterprise customers including brands like Capital One, Eli Lilly, Bethesda, N26, Porsche Digital, remotely and on-site.

Solutions Architect

HelloFresh (UK & Germany)

Managed up to 15 engineers through Team Leads.

Grew the API, Infrastructure, Payments and Loyalty teams.

Launched Hellofresh in 3 additional countries in less time than expected.
Introduced Infrastructure as Code company-wide, with the ability to completely recover from disasters fully automated.

Introduced a docker-based developer experience which brought the time to first commit of new developers down from a few days to a few hours.

Head of Platform Engineering

Designed and co-developed the Consumer API. It powered the launch of the ios and android apps, bringing the Hellofresh experience to the kitchens of millions more people globally.

Introduced Testing and Architecture practices that brought down the rate of defects and the cycle time of new capabilities.

Founded the Platform teams: API, Infrastructure and Payments.
Developed the hiring process that took Hellofresh from 10 to 100 developers in two years.

Senior Software Engineer

None

I was contracted to develop the backend for a corporate intranet application which handled multi-currency expense reporting and workflow automation. I joined a team with Angular frontend engineers and supplied the RESTful API as well as all backend services including web server, database and job scheduling. I once again used the Symfony php/mysql stack to deliver a tested and robust product.

Inpakt

Inpakt was a startup building a social network for people wanting to volunteer with nonprofit organizations, as well as a payments processor for such NPOs.

I was attracted to its socially responsible mission and became one of the first engineers on the team. We delivered MVPs built on symfony/php and mysql in a quick iterative fashion, as the company sought to find its product/market fit.

Our three-strong engineering team demonstrated how velocity can increase when adhering to professional engineering practices such as solid principles and TDD, as a healthy codebase was easy to mold and pivot as the business needed.

Sadly, the national market for donations offered little in the way of business viability. We were unable to penetrate foreign markets and the venture folded after less than a year.

Founding Engineer

SAPO

Contracting on behalf of PrimeIT, I joined teams working on large scale e-commerce and adtech products.

Sapo Voucher was a groupon-like service built on a heavily customized code igniter php+mysql platform, to which I introduced symfony components and increased testing coverage for better productivity and resilience, while keeping performance high.

Sapo Ads is a contextual text advertising service running on highly optimized php and bare-metal mysql instances. I helped deliver better campaign management capabilities.

Both products were available throughout the entire Portuguese-speaking community, meaning we were delivering high scale traffic efficiently to millions of users across Portugal, Brazil, North America and Africa.

Seeking to focus on full time software engineering on my own terms, I was engaged by a client in the automotive industry to develop a multilingual car rental platform. I once again used mysql, php and symfony for the job, deepening my knowledge of the framework while delivering a highly customizable system for stock management, booking system and marketing content management.

Freelancing Developer

Scaling tech organizations at global unicorns like Hellofresh, Contentful and Getir since 2015. Programmer since 2001. Educator and content creator. Finding success by empowering others.

The interview: “… and that’s how I would cleanly design your system!” Your actual system: just a big ball of mud. 

The truth is, it’s really hard to invest in architecture and developer experience when you’re drowning in feature requests and everything is on fire. And that’s just reality at most companies.

As an engineering leader you need to accept that no stakeholder is going to give you permission to build things right for the sake of building them right. Here’s what you do instead:

- You refactor and improve as part of daily work. No refactoring sprints. 

- You invest in tooling and system improvements under the umbrella of big initiatives, not by themselves. 

- You hire an SRE because data shows downtime is costing more than their salary

- You build a platform team because they demonstrably decrease feature time to market 

You root it all in business value. 

And then your system slowly becomes more like the nice well organized idea your engineers know how to build but you never gave them the space to. 

This is your job.

Pedro Gil Carvalho

VP of Engineering • Sharing my journey from developer to VP • Follow for daily tips

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