My journey at DH

What can I say about my journey at Delivery Hero?

Wow. 8 years…

Back in 2016 my wife and I moved to Berlin.

I started working at Foodora. My English was so bad that I could barely understand 50% of what people were saying to me. A small team of people who cared a lot about getting things done. Such a great time to be part of. And we had plenty of fun together around the Ostkreuz office.

My first task was to assemble my chair as the office was still new and the furniture had just arrived. ??

Onboarding was, let’s put it this way, a slim process.

My second task was already dynamic delivery time. On the 1st iteration, the logic was just calculating the distance of the restaurant to the customer plus a handful of other data points summing up blocks of ~5 minutes for the estimation.

As I didn’t speak English well, I was back on being a 100% hands-on engineer at the time and had to change back-office, vendor backend, API, frontend, … And that was the way I got to understand the architecture. No small tasks, no reading docs, but a massive task. Kind of a reflex of how the team was operating at the time. Awesome!

Then, we moved to the DH office. Which had very polarized feelings among the team. Some people loved the “Chick Mick” offices, some hated the corporate feeling.

Let’s merge Foodora + Foodpanda businesses and teams. Such a brilliant game-changer time for the tech teams in DH. Finally talking about microservices, event-driven, brainstorming and defining tech guidelines. A lot of creativity and evolution in this phase.

I was by then leading the Checkout Experience Squad. A 7 (later 14) engineering team that used to get so much done and so fast that we even joke currently about not being happy with delivering a subscription system in 2 weeks (new API, support MIT and CIT, support recurring payments, …). between multiple different projects.

That squad later turned into 3: Checkout Experience, Payments, and Wallet. My first time managing managers and discovering/forming new managers was on this setup as I was leading directly and indirectly the 3 squads.

Most importantly I made true friends on that team who still to date have a good share of my heart and we managed to keep close contact throughout the years.

I then moved to support the founding of what would become the Fintech Vertical, leading the Consumer Payments, Core Payments, and Payments Integrations. A mix of internal, and external contractors.

The clear goal was to launch the Global Fintech Service (just acquired) to its first platform, Pandora (foodpanda and foodora). ~21 countries at the time with different payment integrations and peculiarities.?

What a challenge! So many things to be solved on the complex acquired system in order to scale and release it for Pandora and as a Global Service in DH. Stressful and fun at the same time. Multiple debates for finding the best approach for solving each of the challenges.

During this period I was leading the Payments Tribe, which grew from 10 to 42 people while Fintech to 100s+, and we organized Payments in 6 teams.

I had the opportunity to work alongside great leaders on building the base operational framework almost from scratch.

I was then surprised by an illness and had to be on and off for a couple of months between surgery and treatment. My manager also changed. I had to let go of the Payments Tribe. Time does not and should not stop. Life goes on. Payments were under a new leadership.

It was when the Risk Tribe was introduced to me (~1.5 years ago). I honestly had no idea what they were doing. The Risk Tribe in Fintech was always a team that worked independently from the rest of the vertical. I discovered an entirely new exciting world and accepted the challenge. Enjoyed learning about multiple concepts that I had never worked with before, like: data aggregation algorithms and stack, ML Engineering, and Data Science, …

The main goal was to replace a 3rd party solution which, among other functions, was used for online data aggregation, hosting ML models for real-time prediction, and decision processing.

I am very happy that by this quarter we not only finished replacing the 3rd party in all 40 countries but we also released it to a new DH platform and engaged with other 3 platforms that want to integrate it. On top of that, it has a very competitive cost structure when compared to the 3rd party.

I cannot take the credit for having hired this team as, apart from a few structure and process adjustments, almost the whole team was already there when I arrived. But that does not mean that I feel a bit less proud of having been part of and led this team of top-notch brilliant engineers and managers. I loved every moment and trust 100% in the quality and success of this team and what they can achieve in the future.

Now. My journey at DH finally came to an end.

And I came here to say THANK YOU to everyone whom I had the opportunity to work alongside in any phase of these crazy 8 years journey. Thanks to my wife as well who really supported me during the hardest times, without whom I would have gone definitively crazy.

Trust me, I learned a lot from every one of you.

8 years is a big chunk of my life (21.6% of my life and 50% of my career ??). And even having worked in delivering tech, the most important part is about the human connections that I made. You really touched my life and I hope I had a lasting positive impact on yours as well.

I would love to mention names here from each phase of this journey, as I was writing and remembering a lot of different people/moments. But there were so many, it was not possible.

The world is smaller than most of us think about it. I hope I will still meet many of you throughout my life/career. Don’t be a stranger.

I am receiving a ton of caring messages from multiple people. My team, people that I worked with in the past, peers, ... I feel so grateful I hope one day I can return it.

And for the others impacted as well. You might be feeling angry/sad/disappointed/anxious right now. This is temporary. You have no reason to doubt yourself. Enjoy the presence of your loved ones at this moment, renew your energies and 2024 will be your new beginning.

If you’d like my support, for example on mentoring or mocking interviews, reach out in private and we can organize it. I kind of have a bit of extra time these days. :)

Photo: https://www.pexels.com/pt-br/foto/ramo-galho-setor-filial-5708877/