Danilo Freitas
Chief Technology Officer
Experience
Jan 2022 - Present
2 years 6 months Berlin, Germany
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.
- As a member of the company's senior management, alongside the CEO and COO, I defined and executed the P&L strategy. I 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 supporting fundraising by deep-diving into the financial structures, validating the business rationale as helping my peers to focus on strategic business 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 reduces 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 baking process.
- Create and execute the fintech compliance requirements accordingly with the authorities (ZAG/BaFin)
- I am responsible for creating and executing a data-driven view to leverage financial services based on transnational data (I can’t review which type of data before launching). This view will become a game-changing method for evaluating and managing SMEs' financial risk.
- We formed the first level of engineering leadership by creating cross-functional teams with engineering leads and introduced the concept of platform teams to ensure speed and reliability for business operations.
- With the newly formed engineering team and product, I created a lean strategy for implementing a microservices-based architecture that was made scalable by taking advantage of event-driven design. Migrated existing projects from bare metal to GCP with continuous deployment on a CI/CD pipeline.
Nov 2021 - Jan 2023
1 year 3 months Berlin, Germany
Director of Technology
HomeTogo
- Driving a Marketing Engineering team with 16+ engineers to deliver marketing products for revenue generation.
- Transform the department towards a hyper-scale culture
- Raised the hiring bar
- Bring autonomy to the teams by transforming them into true cross-functional teams; enabling the tech leadership by coaching existing leaders and fostering new ones.
- Ensure the engineering team fosters diversity by promoting a structured hiring process and bias-free talent review.
- Building the next leadership level to close the gap between engineering managers and senior leadership.
- Ensuring business scalability
- Modernizing the system architecture towards scalability.
- Solidifying the stability of the system by bringing observability and incident management.
- Ensure teams deliver on the business KPIs by securing strong quarterly plans
- Facilitating the stakeholder's management
- Structured the Marketing Engineering department
- Consolidated a stakeholder management workflow
- Matched the engineering deliverables with the business KPIs
- Formed a truly cross-functional team in which the business managers, product owners, data analysts, data scientists and engineers collaborate.
- 5% uplift over email marketing revenue channel for re-architecting the email send-out infrastructure.
- 20% rise on customer engagement when applying data science to inspirational content recommendation
- Improved SEO-related page speed by 400%, adding + 2% revenue over the non-paid marketing channels.
Mar 2020 - Oct 2021
1 year 8 months Berlin, Germany
Director of Technology
Finleap Connect
- Leading an organization with 25+ (+30 outsourced) engineers distributed into small teams led by senior managers and engineer managers and 3rd party teams; Successfully completing the fusion of two companies building a performance-oriented team; enabled the revenue growth by streamlining the engineering process and allowed the ongoing country expansion.
- Finalized two M&A operations
- First: Resolved the morale crisis in the acquired company and kept the team on its original formation, enabling a rational decision of which technology to keep from the M&A operation.
- Second: Onboarded a second M&A company with an already predefined merging plan, ensuring the teams have the psychological safety to stay in a company post-merge.
- Reverted two large customer resignment by handling the expectations and building an effective delivery strategy
- Enabled Finleap Connect new business use cases by structure the teams around the data streams
- Created a high-performance team cable of having a cross-team impact
- Set the engineering culture
- Expanded Finleap Connect OpenBanking to the EMEA region.
- Key role in mediating technical meetings between the Bharen Central Bank and Batelco on Open Banking APIs
- Merged the technology of the two companies, allowing for
- Deactivated unsuccessful projects on both ends
- Reduced 20 engineering positions from 3rd party
- Moved 10 engineers to companies from the same group
- Removed duplicated technology while maintaining the customer base of the two companies.
- Responsible for mid and long-term engineering strategy for the Open Banking technologies; the SaaS product finX API
- Coaching the engineering leadership
- Ensuring compliance, Security, and data privacy (attending GDPR, PDPL, and Bafin standards)
- Supporting the onboarding of large customers like Deutsche Bank, Sparkasse, Commerzbank, O2 Telefonica, and Samsung
- Facilitating technical rounds during fundraising and successfully undergoing due diligence scrutiny
- Developing high-revenue products
- Key role on M&A's by leading and assessing the technical due diligence processes
- Growing a diverse talent pool, as well as assuring the diversity can thrive by actively working with engineering managers to foster the inclusive culture
- Strategic and Tactical quarterly planning alongside the business stakeholders
Oct 2018 - Feb 2020
1 year 5 months Berlin, Germany
Senior Engineer Manager
Wayfair
- Leading 25+ engineers (including eng. managers), working on strategic management and driving major architectural decisions alongside business stakeholders and engineering leaders, restructuring a high-impact data processing workflow to allow for exponential revenue gain.
- Introduced a machine learning product complaining review, reducing the time to review from 10 minutes per issue to 1 minute, reducing the offshore reviewer's workforce by 80%.
- Grew the team from 5 engineers to 25 in 8 months
- Reduced 980K in cash burn by redesigning the catalog <> stock communication system based on an event-driven distributed system architecture
- Untangled project ownership between the teams in Berlin and Boston allows for productivity and reduces internal friction.
- Restructured the engineering Q.A process, reducing time to market
- Introduced the distributed systems and container orchestration on the Berlin Merchandise teams
- Became part of the leadership coaching program
- Contributed to the growth of 4 new leaders
- Established a library for new leaders, including books and training
- Became part of the hiring committee and performed more than 200 technical interviews
Aug 2016 - Sep 2018
2 years 2 months Berlin, Germany
Chief Technology Officer (co-founder)
RideLink
- As CTO and managing director, led the original team which built the product, being responsible for extending the product into other countries, engineering budget, and all the personnel working in Berlin (including people outside of IT).
- Successful fundraising campaign, ensuring investors have the right understanding of the technical capabilities of the platform
- Launching the Ridelink in 3 countries (Germany, United Kingdom, and Spain)
- Responsible for the system architecture
- Built and maintained the server infrastructure
- Supported due diligences
- Hiring and team culture
- Built a cross-functional team of engineers (mobile, backend, and frontend) and UX designers
Oct 2015 - Jul 2016
10 months Berlin, Germany
Technical Lead
RideLink
- Build the end-to-end project leading a team of 10 engineers and two UX designers; Over the course of 9 weeks, developed an MVP carsharing platform which included a fully-fledged payments system, back-office, and CRM integration.
Oct 2012 - Sep 2015
3 years Berlin, Germany
Technical Lead
Rocket Internet
- Technical project leader responsible for building the tech startups from the group up alongside the business manager and hiring the initial team that further took care of the newly created venture.
- Ridesurf - Ridesharing: Worked on the MVP specification and development. In this project, the most challenging aspect was the real-time communication between two moving devices and the handling of scalable connections. In the back office, I specified and implemented the operational dashboard where the company agents could manage the demand according to the fleet and user demand.
- Tripda - Carpool: Together with the product owner and design team, lead the product specification, having a decisive impact on the platform's time to market. The most technical challenge was handling geofences when launching the platform in 16 countries.
Jan 2011 - Aug 2012
8 months Brazil
Interim - Local CTO Westwing Brazil
Rocket Internet
- As interim local CTO, led 12 engineers and launched the Westwing Brazil, Westwing Shop, and Bamarang; responsible for the local engineering team, Internationalization, hiring, and team culture.
Feb 2009 - Jan 2012
3 years Brazil
Software Engineering Manager
TV1
- Leading a team of 6 engineers and responsible for engineering the Official Brazilian government portal (Brazil.gov.br) and other federal portals such as Presidencia.gov.br, Secom.gov.br.
Feb 2007 - Jan 2008
1 year Brazil
Full Stack Engineer
Estúdio Ziper
- Developing embedded systems for industrial design projects and web services.
Jan 2005 - Jan 2007
1 year 1 month São Carlos, Brazil
Technical Trainee
Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR)
- Developing an internal system to control the electronics workshop and fixing electronic equipment.
Languages
Portuguese
Native
English
Advanced
German
Elementary
Education
Oct 2011 - Jun 2013
Instituto Europeo di Design
Master Industrial Design · Industrial Design · Milano, Italy
Oct 2007 - Jun 2010
Universidade São Judas Tadeu
Bachelor of Industrial Design · Industrial Design
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