About Me

Who

What

• Currently employed by Spendesk as a Staff Engineer in Paris, France.
• Until mid-2022 I was working for Airwallex, a FinTech company based in APAC, and for which I started the European software development center in Amsterdam, focusing on building an online payment service provider.
• Until 2020, I was Principal Developer & Fellow at booking.com. Between 2017 and 2020 I have been leading there the architecture and the implementation of a scalable and flexible payment and financial platform, encompassing world-wide online payments, regulatory compliance, accounting, and invoicing. In this position I was part of the Payments Business Unit, comprising about 180 engineers, working in close relation to the senior director of technology and the senior director of product. On these topics I was also in charge of the alignment between technical stakeholders and risk and compliance officers on such topics as change management, SOx, PCI-DSS, PSD2, KYC, and information security.
• Before this assignment, I have initiated and led the creation of the Site Reliability Engineering organisation in the Core Infrastructure department. I have deep insights in what makes a software architecture resilient, and how to organise incident response at scale.
• In 13 years at booking.com I have also been part of many other teams in various roles, including senior individual contributor, product owner and people manager.

How

• I focus on solving massive scalability issues, and know how to tackle the challenges of explosive growth, from tenths to thousands of developers, including technical, organisational, and business point of views.
• I operate by engaging continuously with multiple stakeholders across the company, while staying up to date on all technological details in order to connect engineering excellence and business knowledge.
• I strongly believe that relentless customer focus informed by excellent data gathering and efficient cross-functional communication is the key to successful delivery for engineering teams.
• As a leader, my approach is to empower and trust my teams, preferring independence informed by a solid common vision over micro-management. As a strategic thinker, I am able to define the vision and devise a pragmatic way to get there. I am hands-on when needed and I am never satisfied by a status quo that creates problems or roadblocks. As an avid learner, I have the conviction that insights can come from anywhere and from anybody, and I strive to create an atmosphere where feedback and challenging questions are encouraged.