Luiz Gonzaga dos Santos Filho, MBA

People-centric engineering leader with ~23 years scaling teams and orgs across Coursera, AWS, startups and government; currently leading the Developer Experience and the AI transformation for Coursera.

A life-long learner and teacher, humbled by the people I've met along the way.

For a more verbose version of my resumé, visit luiz.dev/cv/verbose.

Experience

Mentor @ Topmate.io
Oct 2023 – present

  • Top 1% mentor globally and top 100 in Canada

Software Engineering Manager ➜ Senior Software Engineering Manager @ Coursera
Feb 2021 – present

  • Headed the AI Engineering transformation with positive ROI: from adoption, to fluency, to increasing productivity, while maintaining quality and stability
  • Timely delivered Enterprise growth initiatives: unlocking millions of dollars in recurring revenue with no additional headcount
  • Saved hundreds of thousands of dollars per quarter with improved organizational efficiency with org-wide processes, improving metrics and accountability, reducing touchpoints, improving executive decision-making, increasing hiring throughput, etc
  • Organizational growth: led several teams and charters, hired and promoted engineers to Senior, Staff, Sr. Staff and Manager
  • Championed strong team culture and well-being by authoring and driving different org-wide policies around DE&I, increasing our hiring pipeline's diversity by ~10% and maintaining highest team retention in the org

Software Engineering Manager II ➜ Software Engineering Manager III @ Amazon / AWS
Sep 2017 – Dec 2020

  • At Amazon Payments: led a cross-functional team to deliver the end-to-end payments integration for Amazon Turkey (amazon.com.tr), involving international and cross-department collaboration and materializing Amazon's expansion in Europe; drove early adoption of PSD2 regulations, ensuring European market compliance ahead of competitors; owned Payment on Delivery for India market
  • At AWS Route53: hired and grew a team from scratch; measurably improved operational efficiency, accessibility, and usability across five different products; owned multiple product roadmaps and delivered two global product launches, expanding AWS Route53's presence into new markets and regions
  • Drove organizational change and fostered inclusion: improved our sourcing efficiency by ~32% and our pipeline's diversity by ~11%; championed an engineering-wide policy to promote inclusion and belonging; as a certified Cultural Competences for Teams instructor, trained hundreds of leaders and engineers around diversity and inclusion
  • Mentored and supported other managers: served on the Software Engineering Manager Peer Advisory board, providing guidance and support to peers

Senior Frontend Engineer ➜ Frontend Team Lead @ Brandwatch
Apr 2016 – Feb 2017

  • As the Frontend team lead: helped the PM with agile ceremonies and backlog prioritization; liaison with the team manager in the UK headquarters
  • As a Senior Frontend Engineer: worked existing and new feature development on Brandwatch's main product (Analytics); refactored thousands of files on a 5-year-old jQuery codebase, improving bundle size, patching security vulnerabilities, and enabling new features to be used

Full-stack engineer @ X-Team
Apr 2015 – Apr 2015

  • Short collaboration with X-Team's CTO researching, planning and developing the next phase of X-Labs (their open source initiative) and other internal projects involving IndexedDB

Software Engineering Manager @ DataEasy
Jun 2014 – Mar 2016

  • Led Engineering Transformation: directed a company-wide shift to modern DevOps and ChatOps practices, including Git, SemVer, CI pipelines, live application monitoring, automated release management, enabling higher quality and faster releases and allowing the IT department to stay leaner
  • Championed Process Improvement: mapped all engineering processes, reduced touchpoints and staffing needs
  • Fostered growth and upskilling: partnered with a local university to provide automated testing courses for senior engineers, streamlining testing cycles and reducing release bottlenecks
  • Cultivated Innovation and Learning: created a bi-weekly program fostering innovation and knowledge sharing through tech talks and experimentation with new technologies

Senior Frontend Engineer @ Brandwatch
Apr 2013 – Nov 2013

  • Worked on their main product line: Brand Analytics
  • In addition to feature work, defined conventions and wrote codemods to refactor thousands of files across a dozen teams, reducing diff sizes and code reviewing times

Senior Frontend Engineer ➜ Frontend Team Lead @ Content Fleet
Apr 2012 – Mar 2013

  • Worked on their main Analytics application during the startup's growth phase
  • While keeping crucial time-to-market velocity, led mobile responsiveness efforts and performance optimization initiatives, significantly reducing network calls and minimizing source code for a faster UX, especially on mobile devices, going from yellow to green on Lighthouse
  • Responsible for the frontend strategy, conventions, quality, performance improvements and training new team members

Full-stack Engineer @ Goiás State Government
Feb 2007 – Mar 2012

  • Worked as a full-stack java engineer on the Government's Human Capital Management (HCM) system, supporting payroll and other features for 200k+ people
  • Led several performance, usability and accessibility improvements around page load reductions, ease of use, decrease of time to action and others

Junior Full-stack Engineer @ DR Sistemas & Interagi
2004 – 2005

  • Interagi: developed CRUD applications and did some programmatic image processing
  • DR Sistemas: developed a Backend application for the public law sector

Misc Software Engineering & Consultancy gigs @ Freelancer
Jan 2003 – Dec 2014

  • Vega Sistemas, Brazil: High-level architecture on migrating a desktop application to a web platform
  • SENAC Goiás, Brazil: Consultancy on web development best practices, productivity tools, agile methodologies and programming languages for their internal development department
  • Federal University of Goiás, Brazil: Developed their public admission (Vestibular) system and website

Other

Over 23 experiences as an instructor or speaker and 7 volunteer positions around leadership, web development, community and the arts. See all of them at luiz.dev/cv/verbose.

Education

 Degrees

  • Business Process Management, MBA @ IT Management Institute (IGTI) – Brazil
  • Computer Engineering, Bachelor @ Federal University of Goiás – Brazil
  • Computer Science, Visiting Student @ Saint Mary's University – Canada

Languages

  • Portuguese — Native
  • English — Fluent
  • German & Spanish — Basic

Other

Over 33 courses and specializations taken, 72 books read, 32 events attended and 8 achievements on software engineering, entrepreneurship, leadership and self growth. See all of them at luiz.dev/cv/verbose.

Skills and Competencies

12 factor apps, agile methodologies, art, aws, b2b, backbone, bdd, bpm, budgeting, business process management, candidate sourcing, career growth, coaching, communication, community, continuous integration, cross-functional collaboration, css, cvs, de&i (diversity, equity & inclusion), delivery management, devops, docker, documentation, ed-tech, education, effective communication, enterprise, event management, external communication, flux, freetest, github, google apps scripts, hibernate, highcharts, hiring, html, internal communication, jasmine, java ee, javascript, jenkins, jira, jquery, jsp, kanban, leadership, leveldb, management, marketing, maven, mentoring, mentorship, mongodb, monitoring, mustache, mysql, new relic, ngo, node, non-profit, operational efficiency, organizational strategy, payment services, people management, performance metrics, phantom, php, pivotal tracker, policy development, postmortem process, process improvement, product development, product launch, project management, public relations, public speaking, react, remote collaboration, require, requirejs, rest, resume, revenue growth, risk management, route 53, scrum, semver, shell script, software development, software development life cycle, software engineering, software quality, software testing, spiritualism, sql, stakeholder engagement, stakeholder management, struts, svn, tape, team management, testlink, theater, time managing, underscore, user experience, velocity, vendor relationship, web development, web services,