# Luiz Gonzaga dos Santos Filho, MBA

Vancouver, Canada

## Contact

- [Email](mailto:lfilho@gmail.com)
- [LinkedIn](https://linkedin.com/in/luizgonzaga)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/lfilho)
- [SpeakerDeck](https://speakerdeck.com/lfilho)
- [Topmate](https://topmate.io/luizgonzaga)
- [www.luiz.dev](https://luiz.dev)

## Introduction

People-centric engineering leader with ~23.5 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](https://www.linkedin.com/in/luizgonzaga/details/recommendations/).

## Experience

### Topmate.io — Mentor (Oct 2023 – present)

**Top 1% mentor globally** and **top 100 in Canada**

### Coursera — Software Engineering Manager / Senior Software Engineering Manager (Feb 2021 – present)

Managed several teams and charters in both the Enterprise and Platform org:
- Owned Developer Experience & Quality, developing and executing an AI roadmap for Engineering, measurably increasing adoption, fluency and productivity
- Drove key Enterprise metrics and projects, unlocking millions of dollars in revenue
- Led key products like SkillSets, Employability, Careers and Admin experience
- Highest retention rate in the org
- Improved team's processes for better remote-first practices and more efficient collaboration with other teams and stakeholders
Organizational contributions:
- Created and owned several org-wide process, increasing key metrics, reducing touchpoints, increasing accountability and better equipping high leadership on critical decision making
- Created an org-wide policy, increasing inclusiveness and belonging
- Above average interview count
- Transitioned a Senior Engineer towards becoming an Engineering Manager
- Volunteered in the DE&I squad, helping come up and drive many of the org-wide goals taken in the area
- Improved our Postmortem process, automating and reducing high touch-points, enabling better accountability, metrics and easier knowledge sharing within the company
- Improved velocity by reducing toil, improved documentation and efficiency for cross functional collaboration in Enterprise org's biggest cross-functional internal forum
- Proposed measurable improvements for other orgs (Recruiting and IT), increasing the hiring pipeline throughput and diversity

### Amazon / AWS — Software Engineering Manager II / Software Engineering Manager III (Sep 2017 – Dec 2020)

- Proposed and implemented an engineering-wide "Going off-call" policy, increasing inclusiveness and belonging
- As a certified Cultural Competences for Teams instructor, increased inclusiveness and diversity awareness to the 300+ employees that took the training
- Part of the Software Engineering Manager Peer Advisory board, helping new managers onboard and be successful in the company
- Promoted to Software Engineering Manager III
Amazon Payments
- Team owning 2 charters (International Expansion integrations and Payment on Delivery)
- Led a cross-functional team to deliver the end-to-end payments integration for Amazon Turkey (amazon.com.tr). This multi-year project involved weekly collaboration and coordination with teams, roles, partners and vendors across multiple countries
- First team to start PSD2 work that enabled Amazon to stay compliant in Europe (SEPA DD)
- Owned Payment on Delivery for India market
AWS Route53
- Hired a specialized team from scratch, creating interfaces with other teams in the org
- Responsible for maintaining existing and building new generations of different Route53's User Experience (Consoles) with measurable operational, accessibility and usability improvements
- Owned 5 products across 2 tech stacks, serving multiple sub-orgs and stakeholder groups
- Launched two world-wide projects and expanded our presence to multiple new partitions and regions
- Improved Route53's sourcing efficiency by ~32% and our candidate diversity by ~11%

### Brandwatch — Senior Frontend Engineer / Frontend Team Lead (Apr 2016 – Feb 2017)

Moved back to Germany and Brandwatch. After 8 months, became the team lead.
- Worked on existing and new features on their main product (Analytics)
- Wrote a script to perform a massive refactor (thousands of files) to update a ~5 year old jQuery codebase (with several breaking changes) to the latest version, improving bundle size, patching security vulnerabilities, improving performance on some DOM operations and enabling new jQuery features for the team to use
- Tracked overall progress of the team and removed blockers
- Helped the PM with Scrum ceremonies and prioritization
- Held local, more frequent 1-1s with the team

### X-Team — Full-stack engineer (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

### DataEasy — Software Engineering Manager (Jun 2014 – Mar 2016)

DataEasy provides different solutions for end-to-end electronic document process management and automation. It has Brazil's biggest private and government organizations as their clients.
Technical contributions:
- Doubled the Engineering org to 5 teams and 4 charters (all their products), hiring teams from scratch, creating new roles and interfaces
- Migrated the company's infrastructure to Git and Github
- Implemented Semantic Versioning to all products in the company
- Implemented the company's first automated release script
- Created their first CI pipeline with Jenkins and Github
- Introduced Slack to the company and created a set of ChatOps commands to manage releases
- The points above enabled me to introduce the concept of "DevOps" in the company, enabling engineers to prep releases on their own with confidence and efficiency, enabling IT department (previously preparing the releases) to stay small and lean
- Introduced advanced monitoring in our applications (New Relic)
Organizational contributions:
- Created "Funky Fridays": bi-weekly innovation/learning days where employees could experiment with new technologies and solutions, prepare a tech talk for the company, etc
- Mapped all engineering processes in BPMN from scratch — eliminating single points of failure, reducing onboarding friction, and giving every team member a foundation and agency to improve processes
- Collaborated with local University and had a few senior engineers join me in automated tests course provided by top professors. This combined with the above allowed us to streamline our testing cycles, reducing a big bottleneck in our release cycle
- Helped choose a new ticketing system for the company

### Brandwatch — Senior Frontend Engineer (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

### Content Fleet — Senior Frontend Engineer / Frontend Team Lead (Apr 2012 – Mar 2013)

Worked as a frontend-focused full-stack engineer.
- Developed RESTful APIs, and their main MVC application
- Created the company's first automated build and deploy script
- Sped up the app's performance by minimizing the amount of network calls, introducing tools to minimize source code, removing dead code, downsampling raster images, etc
- Improved the app's UX and performance in high resolution displays by drawing icons in pure CSS, converting images to vectors (SVG), etc
Became the Frontend Team Lead. Additional responsibilities:
- Responsible for the team's conventions, refactorings, architectural decisions and app performance improvements
- Responsible for training team members and new hires

### Goiás State Government — Full-stack Engineer (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

### DR Sistemas & Interagi — Junior Full-stack Engineer (2004 – 2005)

Interagi and DR were where I had my full-time internships - 6 months each.
- At Interagi, I developed CRUD applications in PHP, MySQL and HTML and some image processing via PHP
- At DR Sistemas, I developed a Backend application for the public law sector. Responsible for collecting specs from Business and implementing them in Java

### Freelancer — Misc Software Engineering & Consultancy gigs (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

## Education

### Business Process Management, MBA

- IT Management Institute (IGTI), Brazil — Dec 2017

### Computer Engineering, Bachelor

- Federal University of Goiás, Brazil — Jun 2011
- Relative average grade: 85%

### Computer Science, Visiting Student

- Saint Mary's University, Canada — 2010/1
- Won the Emerging Leaders of America Scholarship

## Languages

- Portuguese: Native
- English: Fluent
- German & Spanish: Basic

## Skills

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