David Terranova

Engineering Leader | Scaling Teams & Distributed Systems | Product-Led Growth

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Engineering leader with 12+ years building and scaling distributed systems, 8 years managing high-performing teams of up to 25 engineers, and proven track record delivering products serving 40M+ MAU. Specialized in technical strategy, architecture, and team development, I focus on People, Culture, Strategy and deliveries. Promoter of iterative development, product-led growth, and servant leadership. Hands-on manager who combines deep technical expertise (Go, distributed systems, cloud architecture) with strong people management skills. Recent achievements: Led AI-powered platform development, architected event-sourcing solutions at scale, and built engineering cultures focused on autonomy, ownership, and continuous improvement.

Moto: Sometimes failing and always learning.


Work Experience

Engineering Manager

Lokalise | 2024 - Present

People, Culture, Strategy and delivery

  • Led AI-powered Translation platform team, delivering significant improvement in translation quality while reducing costs
  • Managed team of 6 engineers across 3 timezones, achieving 80+% on-time delivery rate
  • Trust, transparency, open feedback, bottom up, ownership, data driven, iterative, continuous improvement
  • Build and share the vision people can appropriate to reflect in the product
  • De-risking (ICE), visibility and dependency management, operational excellence

Senior Engineering Manager

Smallpdf | 2021 - 2024
Golang, AWS, Postgres, CQRS

In charge of the the Document legality domain. Extending and managing the domain with a second team. Driving the technical strategy and architecture.

  • Promote a culture of transparency, initiatives, autonomy, ownership and accountability
  • OKR definition, performance reviews, process improvements
  • Share system, software architectures designs and documentations practices to increase engineering maturity
  • Share experiences & learnings with other EMs to improve the engineering organization

Engineering Manager

Smallpdf | 2020 - 2021
Golang, AWS, Postgres, CQRS

Hands-on engineering manager, hired and setup a cross functional team. Architected and delivered CQRS & Event Sourcing digital signature platform serving 40M+ MAU, reducing signature processing time and improving system reliability uptime.

  • Hands-on technical leadership, architectural RFC proposal and reviews
  • Estimations, planning, prioritization, delivery, monitoring, maintenance, support
  • Team health, professional and personal development, coaching, mentoring

Senior Software Engineer - Backend

Smallpdf | 2020
Golang, AWS, OpenID Connect

Coordinating integrating and extending Keycloak to support our 40M+ monthly unique active users.

  • Designing and implementing custom specifications to support product requirements
  • Writing extensions and adapters to support existing user management system
  • Writing custom authorizers to support seamless migration from legacy authentication system to the new one
  • Writing generic middleware to provide authorization to existing backend services

Chief Technology Officer

TellMePlus | 2017 - 2019
Golang, Streaming, k8s

Drive the roadmap, technical strategy and key architecture of Predictive Objects to transform our proof of concept into product. A clound agnostic platform, available on premise, able to ingest realtime sensors data, compute extended features, build datasets and use supervised machine learning to train Predictive Objects models to anticipate failures on industrial plants.

    Engineering Manager - DevOps

    TellMePlus | 2015 - 2017
    Golang, Python, Terraform

    Manage transversal team supporting Predictive Objects in multi cloud environments. Promoted development good practices such as testing, continuous deployment, communication, security guidelines and tooling to the engineering teams.

      CTO / Co-Founder

      Arksens cyber security | 2014 - 2015
      Ruby on rails, Proxmox, Debian, Ansible

      Arksens Cyber Security is a digital security vendor for small & medium sized companies. It provides & customizes a set of open source tools and services to help companies autonomously reducing cyber threats by themselves at a controlled cost.

        Software Engineer - Backend

        TellMePlus | 2013 - 2014
        Java, MongoDB

        Shopping Intelligence, Recommendation over Big-Data using NoSQL & CHOCO library to produce fine grained recommendations.

          Research Engineer

          LIRMM - Montpellier Laboratory of Computer Science, Robotics, and Microelectronics | 2013
          Java, Choco

          Constraint Programming. Demonstrate constraint programming capabilities on concrete business cases.

            Software Engineer

            Sanofi | 2011 - 2013
            Objective-C, SQLite

            Created a sqlite based framework for mobile applications designed to compound with security guidelines of clinical studies.

              Projects

              Artistic Pictures

              Photography, Software Development

              Capturing the perfect moment, artistic vision in mind

              Construction Coordinator / builder

              Construction

              Design, creation, and construction of my personal house

              Le Sonambule, volunteering

              Arts - Music

              Contributing to make the organisation to offer concerts at a fair price

              Recommendations

              Mike Pilawski

              Mike was David's mentor

              David is a great technology leader and an engineering manager. He is a strong architect capable of thinking through complex architectural choices and arriving at simple and reliable solutions. He can take large, complex projects, identify key risks and direct the team through milestones to completion. He is also a great manager who deeply cares for his team and invests time to help his team members grow.

              It was a real privilege working with David and I hope I will have the opportunity to do it again.

              Jakub Skoczeń

              Jakub reported directly to David

              David is an exceptional hands-on manager with extensive technical knowledge and a pragmatic approach to problem-solving. He has a talent for building efficient and successful teams full of trust, and his collaborative leadership style inspires great results. I highly recommend him as a skilled and knowledgeable leader.