(Senior) Engineering Manager

Managing the Criteo In-store team across a variety of mission critical projects whilst also uplifting the technical side of the business's overall capability in order to meet a growing demand from enterprise customers, partners, and Criteo (acquirer).

The role still required me to work somewhat as an individual contributor. However, I was also directly / indirectly managing a team of around 20 (engineers, QA, delivery management). Outside of project outcomes, a large part of my focus was on reducing the technical cost of ownership, improving the productivity and agility of my team, and improving delivery quality.

There were several areas of improvement made to achieve those goals:

• Simplifying the branching strategy to reduce the number of branches and amount of code drift from active development to production.
• Finding pragmatic opportunities to automate busy-work or higher risk deployment activities. E.g. automated & versioned database migrations, moving more heavily towards container compute workloads, and the introduction of infrastructure as code through CDK.
• Working with technical and business stakeholders to:
  • Identify opportunities to improve technical code quality at the same time as delivering project outcomes.
  • Identify larger strategic opportunities to dramatically improve the state of the platform and the codebase.
• Working with the development team to upskill them and to raise the bar on expected performance. At the same time, also working with some very talented engineers to mentor them on coaching and change management to introduce the positive change they were seeking to implmement and drive.