Professional career
Urbantz | Nov 2022 - now
In November 2022 I took up the role of VP engineering at Urbantz. Here, I support the managers of the separate teams. This involves hiring, retention and growth, but also building balanced roadmaps driven by functional and technical progress. The result is a team of strong engineers, motivated by the project itself and excited about the way we balance roadmap items with technical initiatives. To achieve this, some decisions had to be made top down, but not without collecting feedback bottom-up and adapting to tailor the way we organise teams and their work. The introduction of several mechanisms has since resulted in happy engineers that feel we are working on the right things. But we also see happier customers, because we take the complaints they have seriously and try hard to strike a good balance between reliability and missing features.
madewithlove | Feb 2021 - Oct 2022
At madewithlove, I basically did what I did at Teamleader, over and over again: I helped teams through fast growth, organize the way they work and made sure they could deliver value to customers. Of course, every company is different and so are the priorities.
Within these teams, my focus has spanned many aspects of running successful engineering teams. Common struggles like improving the preparation and predictability of work or transparent communication on the progress and decisions being made by the team. I have conducted tens of interviews with candidates, as well as improved the hiring process from non-existing to a well-oiled routine. I’ve led the creation of a progression framework that solved issues around hiring, salaries, and growth. Together with the teams I worked with, I created a vision around quality assurance as well as led the hiring to execute it. In general, I helped teams get the most out of their existing agile processes, tailored to their needs.
Teamleader | Jan 2016 - Feb 2021
I started at Teamleader as a PHP developer, but with the idea of leading one of two teams as more engineers joined the team. I initially led the team that focused on building new features. We quickly changed that approach, so both teams had a healthy mix of new features and bugfixes. I was closely involved in overarching decisions on processes, hiring, team organization, and the actual product, especially as new challenges arose as we continued to grow.
After a few years, I decided to apply for the (just published) role of engineering manager to support the 4–5 teams we had at that time. From that moment, even more than before, my focus became on making sure that teams had the right people to do the work they had lined up within their specific domain without losing touch with the bigger picture. Communication and people management soon started to take up most of my time. With my product and engineering knowledge, I was still involved in product and technical decisions when teams struggled.
Most of all, I’m proud of growing the team up to about 25 engineers and having a stable period with no attrition of 18 months and high stability during COVID.
Sevenedge | April 2014 - Jan 2016
Sevenedge is probably the odd position in my career (so far). Tired of working on the same product for multiple years, I considered working in an agency, as it would allow me to have a fresh start every so many months. I primarily focused on backend system design and implementation.
In the 18 months I worked there, we launched a good deal of successful marketing websites for big customers like Samsung Belgium, AXA, MIVB, and Belfius. The irony was that I missed fine-tuning a single product that I know through and through, and the constant challenge of turning customer needs into solutions.
Some of the challenges that landed on my desk were:
- Building a proof of concept integration with a legacy system with no documentation and taking it to production.
- Designing architecture that could deal with short peaks of high load, requiring a clever caching strategy and careful database design.
- Designing anti-tampering measures for an in-browser game.
This was also the first role where I really started coaching other developers on the team.
Netlog - Twoo | April 2011 - April 2014
I joined Netlog as a full-stack developer. At the time, Full stack meant jQuery and plain old JavaScript, html and sass. For the first 6 months, I worked on a new version of the activity feed and a redesign of the front. The increasing market share of Facebook made the company decide to pivot and fully focus on a new product, Twoo.
For Twoo, I initially built some smaller features and co-designed and built a reusable tool to migrate users from other services we acquired at the time. After 6 months, I focused on the implementation of a fake user detection system. Given we had about 18 million users, of which up to 70k connected simultaneously during peak hours, performance was always key. We managed to introduce around 100 metrics that fed a scoring algorithm to point out suspicious usage.
I took the initiative to build a self-learning service that would adjust the scoring based on input from our community team, adjusting the scoring to reach the best ratio of detecting fake users without false positives. In the final phase, I built in soft-blocking which made fake users believe they were still active without having the ability to interact with real users. This drastically impacted the inflow of new fake accounts.
Before all that
- Web developer at the University of Ghent, Bioinformatics department. At VIB, I helped doctorate students with the challenges they encountered to organize their data (which was often related to DNA sequencing) in relational databases, optimizing it for intensive searching.
- Software developer at Custodix. At Custodix I built medical software which had a high focus on anonymization and pseudonymization of patient data. I primarily built an internal web application using JSF, Hibernate & Spring as well as a desktop C#.Net application.
Education
Industrial engineering - Informatics
HoGent, Belgium
Other
Native Dutch speaker, proficient in English, I’ll manage in French
