Diego Ballona
VP, Solutions at FinI'm a software engineer and a hobbyist musician. I started my career as a founding engineer and later led engineering organisations in big tech companies like Spotify and Meta.
I have worked in complex, mission-critical, highly regulated domains such as payments, trust & safety and customer service, and led distributed teams of 100+ across three continents along the way.
My teams have supported ambitious company goals: increase revenues by 50x to nine digits in ~12 months, launch products that challenged what was possible with AI, and materially cut costs to support profitability.
My greatest career fortune, however, is showing up to work with people I admire, trust, and learn from daily.
Writing
Thoughts, reflections and learnings- Outro and optimism,
- Just enough,
- Trust is antifragile,
- Capacity Planning basics (Alex Xu / ByteByteGo),
- Reorg basics for engineering leaders (The Pragmatic Engineer),
- Politics is unresolved tension,
- Navigating the IC to EM transition (The Pragmatic Engineer),
- Out of bounds,
- Alignment across organisations,
- Three simple principles for delegation,
- Calibrations for software engineering interviews,
- Posture in system design interviews,
- Language as a tool for engineering teams,