Diego Ballona
Senior Director of Engineering 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 audacious 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 when that was the problem to solve.
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,