I’m Leonardo — an Engineering Manager based in Amsterdam with 17+ years in software development and 9+ years leading engineering teams.
My career has been anchored in financial infrastructure: banking, card acquiring, rental payments, international payments, and travel commerce. I’ve worked across Brazil and the Netherlands, at companies ranging from early-stage startups to one of the world’s largest travel platforms.
I care about building teams that can name what’s broken and fix it. I’ve done PMBOK waterfall at a Brazilian bank, agile at scale, and everything in between. I believe the best process is the one your team can honestly run — everything else is theater.
What I write about
Engineering leadership from the inside: process decisions, team dynamics, organizational dysfunction, and what actually changes when you get it right. No frameworks-as-religion, no thought-leadership-as-performance. Just observations from someone who’s been in the room.
Side projects
PiggyPulse — a fintech SaaS for personal budgeting, built in Rust, React, and PostgreSQL. It keeps me technically sharp and gives me something concrete to point at when people ask if engineering managers can still build things.