Danilo Freitas

Chief Technology Officer

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Berlin, Germany

Experience

Jan 2023 - Present
3 years 1 month

Chief Technology Officer

VR Smart Guide

  • Responsible for the digitalization of complex financial processes by leveraging AI capabilities and stabilizing a technical team with strong engineering culture
  • Member of the company's senior management alongside the CEO and COO, defined and executed the P&L strategy
  • Rebooted the engineering team by replacing underperforming people, adding flexible engineering profiles for experimental projects, supporting the business, and restructuring the P&L by freezing financially unproductive scopes
  • Actively supported fundraising by deep-diving into financial structures and validating the business rationale to focus on strategic goals
  • Freezing products with no relevant revenue streams
  • Prioritizing the pivot toward data products
  • Renegotiating vendors
  • Cleaning up unproductive SaaS
  • Reorganizing the tech org chart into a flexible team to reduce committed cash burn
  • Created data and AI teams and introduced AI specialists who produced core business solutions such as innovative prediction models for financial scoring and digitalization of the banking process
  • Created and executed fintech compliance requirements in accordance with ZAG/BaFin
  • Responsible for creating and executing a data-driven view to leverage financial services based on transnational data for SMEs' financial risk evaluation and management
  • Formed first-level engineering leadership by creating cross-functional teams and introducing platform teams for speed and reliability
  • Created a lean strategy for implementing a scalable microservices-based architecture using event-driven design and migrated existing projects from bare metal to GCP with CI/CD pipeline
Nov 2021 - Jan 2023
1 year 3 months

Director of Technology

HomeTogo

  • Drove a Marketing Engineering team of 16+ engineers to deliver marketing products for revenue generation
  • Transformed the department toward a hyper-scale culture by raising the hiring bar, bringing autonomy to teams as cross-functional units, coaching existing leaders, and fostering new ones
  • Ensured diversity through a structured hiring process and bias-free talent review
  • Built the next leadership level to close the gap between engineering managers and senior leadership
  • Modernized system architecture for scalability and solidified stability with observability and incident management
  • Ensured teams delivered on business KPIs by securing strong quarterly plans
  • Facilitated stakeholder management
  • Structured the Marketing Engineering department by consolidating stakeholder workflows and matching engineering deliverables with business KPIs
  • Formed a truly cross-functional team of business managers, product owners, data analysts, data scientists, and engineers
  • Achieved a 5% uplift in email marketing revenue by re-architecting the email send-out infrastructure
  • Delivered a 20% rise in customer engagement through data science-driven content recommendation
  • Improved SEO-related page speed by 400%, adding 2% revenue over non-paid marketing channels
Mar 2020 - Oct 2021
1 year 8 months

Director of Technology

Finleap Connect

  • Led 25+ engineers (plus 30 outsourced) in small teams with senior and engineering managers; completed fusion of two companies to build a performance-oriented team and enabled revenue growth and country expansion
  • Finalized two M&A operations: resolved a morale crisis in the first acquired company to decide on technology retention, and onboarded a second company with a predefined merging plan ensuring psychological safety post-merge
  • Reverted two large customer resignations by managing expectations and building an effective delivery strategy
  • Structured teams around data streams to enable new business use cases
  • Created a high-performance team capable of cross-team impact and set engineering culture
  • Expanded OpenBanking to the EMEA region and mediated technical meetings between the Bahrain Central Bank and Batelco on Open Banking APIs
  • Merged technology of both companies by deactivating unsuccessful projects, reducing 20 third-party positions, moving 10 engineers within the group, and removing duplicated technology while maintaining customer base
  • Responsible for mid and long-term engineering strategy for Open Banking technologies and the SaaS product finX API
  • Coached engineering leadership and ensured compliance with GDPR, PDPL, and BaFin standards
  • Supported onboarding of large customers such as Deutsche Bank, Sparkasse, Commerzbank, O2 Telefonica, and Samsung
  • Facilitated technical rounds during fundraising and successfully underwent due diligence scrutiny
  • Developed high-revenue products and led technical due diligence for M&A processes
  • Grew a diverse talent pool and fostered inclusive culture
  • Conducted strategic and tactical quarterly planning alongside business stakeholders
Oct 2018 - Feb 2020
1 year 5 months

Senior Engineer Manager

Wayfair

  • Led 25+ engineers, including engineering managers, and drove major architectural decisions alongside business stakeholders and engineering leaders
  • Restructured a high-impact data processing workflow for exponential revenue gain
  • Introduced a machine learning product complaint review, reducing review time from 10 minutes to 1 minute and offshore workforce by 80%
  • Grew the team from 5 to 25 engineers in 8 months
  • Reduced $980K in cash burn by redesigning the catalog-stock communication system with event-driven distributed architecture
  • Untangled project ownership between Berlin and Boston teams to increase productivity and reduce internal friction
  • Restructured the engineering QA process, reducing time to market
  • Introduced distributed systems and container orchestration for Berlin merchandise teams
  • Contributed to leadership coaching program by growing 4 new leaders and establishing a training library
  • Served on the hiring committee and performed over 200 technical interviews
Aug 2016 - Sep 2018
2 years 2 months

Chief Technology Officer (co-founder)

RideLink

  • As CTO and managing director, led the original team that built the product and extended it into Germany, the United Kingdom, and Spain
  • Managed engineering budget and all personnel in Berlin, including non-IT staff
  • Successfully ran a fundraising campaign, ensuring investors understood the technical capabilities of the platform
  • Responsible for system architecture, server infrastructure, due diligence support, hiring, and team culture
  • Built a cross-functional team of mobile, backend, and frontend engineers and UX designers
Oct 2015 - Jul 2016
10 months

Technical Lead

RideLink

  • Built an end-to-end MVP carsharing platform in 9 weeks leading 10 engineers and 2 UX designers
  • Developed a fully-fledged payments system, back-office, and CRM integration for the MVP
Oct 2012 - Sep 2015
3 years

Technical Lead

Rocket Internet

  • Served as technical project leader responsible for building tech startups from scratch alongside business managers and hiring initial teams
  • Ridelink: see CTO RideLink experience
  • Ridesurf (ridesharing): worked on MVP specification and development, handled real-time communication between moving devices and scalable connections, and implemented an operational dashboard for demand management
  • Tripda (carpool): led product specification with product owner and design team, impacting time to market, and managed geofences for platform launch in 16 countries
Jan 2012 - Aug 2012
8 months

Local CTO Westwing Brazil

Rocket Internet

  • Led 12 engineers as interim local CTO to launch Westwing Brazil, Westwing Shop, and Bamarang
  • Responsible for local engineering team management, internationalization, hiring, and team culture
Feb 2009 - Jan 2012
3 years

Software Engineering Manager

TV1

  • Led a team of 6 engineers and was responsible for engineering the Official Brazilian government portal (Brazil.gov.br) and federal portals such as Presidencia.gov.br and Secom.gov.br
Feb 2007 - Jan 2008
1 year

Full Stack Engineer

Estúdio Ziper

  • Developed embedded systems for industrial design projects and web services
Jan 2006 - Jan 2007
1 year 1 month

Technical Trainee

Universidade Federal de São Carlos

  • Developed an internal system to control the electronics workshop and performed electronic equipment repairs

Skills

  • Software Engineering: Real-time Systems, High Scalability Applications, Data-driven Systems, Microservices Architecture, Unit/integration/functional Tests, Design Patterns (Structural, Creational, Behavioral), Domain-driven Development, Design Principles (Dry, Grasp, Solid), Php/js/nodejs/c#/python/java, Cross-functional Development With Mobile, Machine Learning And Data Science.

  • Infrastructure: Cloud And Bare Metal Networks, Microservice Topology, Docker, Kubernetes, Rabbitmq, Kafka, Aws, Gcp And Digital Ocean, Observability, High Availability.

Languages

Portuguese
Native
English
Advanced
German
Elementary

Education

Oct 2011 - Jun 2013

Instituto Europeo di Design

Master · Industrial Design · Milano, Italy

Oct 2007 - Jun 2010

Universidade São Judas Tadeu

Bachelor · Industrial Design

Oct 2004 - Jun 2005

Senac

IT Technician · Information Technology · Sénac, France

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