After a short andventure in academia, I diverted my attention towards software engineering. It’s worth noting that that adventure in academia culminated in a gold medal at ICYS 2016. ICYS is the International Conference for Young Scients. It gathers young scientists and ranks their research papers by impact.

I started working as a Community Advocate at GitLab. The mission was to cultivate and reshape GitLab’s online community. After a year, I wanted to ramp up my engineering experience. I started working towards transitioning to a developer role. In January of 2018 I transferred to the CI/CD team as a Junior Developer. Here I worked to make sure our CI offering remains the best one on the market.

In May of 2018 I got the the opportunity to manage the Community Advocacy team at GitLab. I always liked helping others do the best work they can so it was a no-brainer. As a Community Advocate Manager I built and nurtured a new advocacy team. After bootstrapping the new team I went back to my biggest passion at work

  • engineering software.

Due to a couple of re-organizations and team splits I went through being a:

  • Developer on the CI/CD team
  • Engineer on the Verify team
  • Engineer on the CI team
  • Engineer on the Pipeline Execution team
  • Engineer on the Pipeline Authoring team

Even though the names of the team and my title changed, the mission stayed the same. Ensure GitLab’s CI offering is the absolute best on the market!

After a couple of years of being an engineer in product development I decided to try something new. I transitioned to being a Contributor Success Engineer. The role is a blend of what I did as an engineer and what I did as a community advocate. It’s about empowering other engineers and making their development journey smooth.

In May 2022 it was finally time for me to leave GitLab. It felt bittersweet. GitLab instilled in me, amazing work principles that I reference to this day.

I ended up up joining Pennylane. Pennylane is a European fintech startup that’s in the accounting software market. My time there was split between engineering and people management. I had experience with working with third-party providers that was useful here. Because of this it was very natural for me to join the banking integrations team. The goal was to make banking integrations smooth for all supported banks. This was interesting because it was about delivering stability for mission critical systems.

I managed a team of 6 people and worked with several adjacent teams. Some of the things that I worked on was process related. Like setting and implementing efficient collaboration within the team. Others were about empowering product managers and engineering managers. A good example is measuring and improving observability for banking systems stability. The last piece of my daily work was delivering product improvements.

In September 2022 a dream came true. A colleague from GitLab asked me to work on an early stage startup he founded. The startup is called OpTonal.

I loved everything about OpTonal, but it came with a catch. The product was developed by an outsourcing agency. We needed to take ownership of engineering, so I focused on that. Over time, we moved from using an external agency to having a team of 7 engineers.

After assuming ownership of engineering, I set out to set a high bar for both quality and velocity. I built an environment that facilitates enthusiastic and fast changes. A key part was making everyone feel comfortable with making frequent and far-reaching changes. It’s my personal belief that engineering orgs operate best when engineers feel safe. Systems and processes should act as “safety nets” for engineers. They should prevent them from causing any damage, and in turn creating a sense of safety.

Due to a weird turn of events one of the two OpTonal co-founders left. I stepped up and “became” a co-founder. A part of stepping up was making strategic technical decisions. I’ve “bet the business” on the direction of AI development. We focused on using publicly available general models instead of developing custom models. This allowed us to pull ahead of the competition. I prioritized features that are not made redundant by the rapid advancement of AI.

Another instrumental part of the “OpTonal experience” was “breakneck” engineering velocity. We set 30 changes / engineer / month as an ambitious goal. This means that every engineer, on average, deployed changes 30 times per month. I searched for ways to empower engineers. Allowing them to make decisions, be autonomous and deliver changes as independently as possible.

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