Engineering Leader ยท Community Builder ยท Servant Leader
I'm an Engineering Manager at Stripe with 13+ years of building products that impact millions. My career has taken me from the high-pressure trenches of Bitdefender, through enterprise-scale migrations at Adobe, into the developer security world at Snyk, and now to the deep belly of risk, fraud, financial crimes and legal operations of global payments at Stripe.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped treating leadership like a title and started treating it like a craft. I believe in servant leadership โ empowering teams through trust, transparency, and companionship rather than hierarchical control. My teams don't just ship code; they build environments where the best ideas win and every person grows.
Beyond the office, I build communities, speak at international conferences, and write about leadership, AI, and what it means to be human in a world being reshaped by technology. I call it the Technological Renaissance.
More than a decade of building products, forming and leading teams, creating thriving cultures, growing 70+ mentees and focusing on what is most important and forever the core: improving humanity and society through leadership, technology and empathy.
Engineering Manager
Scaling the team and platform empowering 8.5k operators globally to govern Operational Work (Risk, Compliance, KYC, Financial Crimes). Saved millions of hours on permissions governance, established a platform for automated work assignment, and drove rapid growth of the Bucharest office while cultivating a high-performance culture.
Engineering Manager
Kickstarted a new division and managed a remote team delivering a best-in-class solution for scanning unmanaged ecosystems. Shifted team culture to increase knowledge sharing, planned major refactoring to reduce code surface by 40%, and streamlined ceremonies to drastically increase focus and collaboration for developers.
Senior Software Engineer โ Technical Lead
Managed teams power-charging the Creative Cloud Platform to accommodate Creative Cloud Express. Led the migration of flagship products like Adobe XD and Adobe Account to modern web architectures, delivered workflows saving millions monthly, and aggressively cut down time from idea to implementation from months to weeks.
Software Engineer โ First Management Role
The crucible years transitioning from UI/UX Developer to Enterprise UI/UX Manager. Built the foundational "get things done" mentality in high-pressure environments, created unified experience teams, shaped ground-shifting security approaches like EDR, and designed systems that significantly shortened execution time.
Keynotes and talks at the intersection of engineering leadership, AI strategy, and what makes teams truly extraordinary.
A 3-layer framework for the AI-Native Engineering Leader. The "Bicycle for the Mind" has been upgraded to a jetpack, but most organizations are still using it to fly in circles. This session shares a practical decision framework โ Product Layer, Team Layer, Leadership Layer โ to transform engineering leaders into Superhuman Orchestrators who amplify human wisdom rather than just automating tasks.
A deep dive into the interplay between emotions, personalities, and high performance. How trust, respect, and a nuanced understanding of human motivation shape technical teams that don't just deliver โ they thrive. From the Three Horsemen of Anger to the Impact Compiler, real frameworks from real teams.
Why "running on localhost" is the biggest career risk in tech. How to move from invisible contributor to visible leader by mastering the art of communication โ from internal presentations to conference stages. A practical guide to building your signal in a world full of noise.
A philosophical exploration of how AI's liberation of human time can lead to a rebirth of creativity. Grounded in real experiments โ from using generative AI to transcend D&D campaigns to redefining what "execution" means when it becomes a commodity. The future belongs to those who choose wisdom over mere intelligence.
I believe you cannot be discovered if you are running on localhost. That's why I built Stories of the Web โ a community for engineers who want to go beyond the surface and dive deep into the real stories behind successful digital products.
We explore the hardships, the victories, the architectural debates, and the human decisions that shape the web. From AI-resilient mindsets to React deep dives, from law & tech to career frameworks โ it's where genuine professional growth happens.
JS, Web Components, Accessibility, AI, and beyond.
A space where all backgrounds and abilities are valued.
The process, research, and hardships rarely shared elsewhere.
Messy, honest notes from building a career and life in public โ without pretending I've figured it out.
Seniority isn't Uptime โ how long you've been in the seat. It's Throughput โ the intensity of battles fought.
Read NoteHiring smart people is the easy part. Ensuring they don't get bored โ and making sure the organization actually sees their work โ is the hard engineering problem.
Read NoteAnger is rarely just anger. In the workplace, it's almost always a secondary emotion โ a UI wrapper hiding Shame, Envy, or Fear. Name the demon, strip it of its power.
Read Note