Leading engineering

Hiring, standards, and the judgement calls — eighteen years of leading teams, and never stopping writing code.

I've been CTO of Hyperspace for 12 years. I've managed the engineering team, the platform architecture and the roadmap, and I never stopped writing code.

Most of what I know about leading engineers I learned by having to do it while also shipping.

Hyperspace (2014)

I led a cross-functional team of eight — three developers, two QA, two 3D artists and an instructional designer — across both platform development and client projects. I defined the roadmap with the CEO, and wrote the product requirements and specifications for the team.

I owned hiring end to end as the company grew from three people to ten: writing the job descriptions, screening, interviewing and making the final call.

I also mentored developers from junior to senior. I ran regular dev meetings where we discussed progress, challenges and new technologies.

I introduced the engineering standards the company still works by: documentation, asset workflows and guidelines, code review, onboarding, and production pipelines.

The platform's major migrations happened while the team kept shipping for clients: Bootstrap to React, vanilla JavaScript to TypeScript, bare-metal servers to Kubernetes. None of them were projects anyone would fund on their own merits, and all of them had to happen underneath a delivery schedule that never paused.

I planned and managed the technical budget — infrastructure, tooling and hiring — with the CEO, and presented roadmap, strategy and live demos to leadership, sales and enterprise clients.

The company pivoted a few times and I was involved in every strategic decision. I evaluated the impact on the engineering team, the platform and our clients, and ran experiments to validate new ideas before we committed to them.

AI as an engineering practice. I established AI-driven workflows across the company — Jira ticket management, code review, deployment assistance, project planning and documentation.

As CTO, I promote the effective use of AI and keep engineering decisions in the hands of experienced engineers who own the work.

Nuevo Nuevo Mundo (2010)

This was the game that jump-started Melee Studios (my games company) back in 2008. It was one of my first experiences as team lead, as I coordinated a very dynamic team over the course of four years. On average the team consisted of five to ten artists, two developers and two writers.

I oversaw every aspect of the game's development, set the vision and direction, and established the pipelines and tools for team collaboration.

The game was eventually cancelled, but it was an invaluable learning experience for me and I believe it laid the foundation for my future work in leading engineering.

Glue (2024)

I ran technical due diligence on three acquisitions, advised the CEO on fit, and led the integration of the acquired codebases and assets afterwards. Glue was the largest of them.

It was a technically complex platform built in Unity. I led the asset migration, supporting our 3D artists in adapting the content to our platform, so their environments could move from Unity to WebGL.

MalagaJam (2015)

Community was the other half of the education. I co-founded MalagaJam and served as Vice President for four years, organising hackathons that grew from 50 to more than 300 attendees, and running workshops and talks.

I was also a mentor on several public programmes for startups, helping early-stage founders build their products and companies.

Where I've used it

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