Speaker
Abstract
When I took on the Director of Engineering role at Nubank, I had no idea just how many times I’d need to reinvent my leadership style. In the span of three years, my organization grew from 30 engineers to over 100, forcing me to recalibrate everything from meeting structures to team compositions to decision-making frameworks to scale myself.
I remember feeling like I was changing the wheels on a speeding train—trying to keep velocity while fundamentally reworking how we operated.
In this talk, I’ll share the highs, lows, and practical lessons from each year of this journey. We’ll explore the patterns that emerged as I navigated the organizational change: experimenting to find the right team topologies, building the leadership team, and embracing reorganizations as a natural part of scaling.
Key Takeaways:
- Up-leveling for Resilience & Sustainability – How to raise seniority, rotate expertise, and optimize team sizing and tenure distribution to enhance knowledge transfer, reduce silos, and build resilient squads that excel in crisis management, sustain operations, and tackle complex technical challenges.
- Building an Empowered & Coherent Leadership Team – Approaches for spotting and nurturing leaders who can carry the vision & the strategy through multiple layers of the organization.
- Continuous Reorganizations as a Feature, Not a Bug – How to view reorgs as iterative improvements rather than chaotic disruptions, and the communication strategies that make them stick.
Topics
QCon London 2025 is a three day conference for senior software engineers, architects and team leads. An international program committee of working engineers selects every session. Patterns and practices, not products and pitches.
Part of the track
The Path to Senior Engineering Leadership Hosted by Leandro Guimarães Senior Engineering Manager @ClassPass, former Chair of QCon in BrazilFrom the same track
Monday 7 April
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