Portugal

🚀Niko Roberts

Senior Engineering Manager

Understand the process of training, motivating and directing your team members.

Managing people

How to create a positive workplace culture that drives collaboration and productivity?

Fostering a good team culture

Steps to building and maintaining a strong, cohesive and effective team.

Building an effective team

Learn the tips to successfully manage a team in a remote environment.

Managing a remote team

How to maintain trust, commitment, accountability deliver results while handling conflict

Avoiding common dysfunctions

How to determine what is a good balance of skill sets for your organization's needs

Building balanced teams

How to identify star candidates, evaluate technical ability, and close hires

Hiring software engineers

Decision making as a software engineer or lead - how to become better at making the right choices

Making better tech choices

Making remote and globally distributed teams work for you and your needs.

Working remotely

Talk to people who have learned to manage their imposter syndrome.

Dealing with imposter syndrome

Get actionable feedback on your resume or portfolio.

Resume and portfolio review

Practice HR, technical and behavioural interviews with mentors.

Practice mock interviews

Talk to people who've broken into the tech industry and learn their stories.

Breaking into tech

Learn the best ways to answer technical interview questions with frameworks

Acing technical interview questions

How to set up the team for success by defining and measuring team's performance.

Choosing metrics and team goals

How to define and execute a successful launch and managing stakeholders expectations. (eg. MVP)

Launching new products or features

Manage team expectations and get the most out of your meetings.

Running effective meetings

How to work with team members with different skill sets but towards a common goal?

Working cross-functionally

Navigating the working relationship with PM's and engineers as a designer.

Working with product and engineering

How to conduct interviews, what to ask, and how to analyze your results? (eg. user interview)

Conducting effective customer interviews

Volunteering as a mentor to provide whatever help I can to women who are entering the tech industry.

I’m currently managing and hiring for a fully remote team based in Portugal, that has set out to improve and modernise the core experience of getting work done on the platform.
We also own a large portion of the monolithic architecture of the platform and we are giving it a visual refresh for users and an architectural refresh for developers.

The team so far has contributed to big improvements across our customer experience. Which has resulted in Taskers on the platform earning millions more each year.

We’ve created a visual design and product vision as well as technical architectural vision for our space that has garnered support from across the organisation and giving our team a reference to where we are headed.
We’ve upgraded large parts of the web and iOS monoliths and introduced seams and new patterns for teams to better own different parts of the user experience and improve them into the future.

From May 2020 I became the director of engineering for the teams focussed on the top of the growth funnel. These teams were focussed on International expansion and SEO engineering.
This was an opportunity to be a manager of managers and step into a more guiding role for teams and broader organisational culture (not something I had much time to focus on in my own startups previously).

During this time the company shifted to being fully remote because of Covid. As I was the most experienced remote worker in the company, I wrote the guidelines and created a community of people interested in improving remote work processes.

When the VP of engineering left, I took over the engineering management of the hiring process. I took some improvements that had been in the works for two years and saw them across the finish line. So our candidates could have a better experience and we’d have a good range of signal gathering.

In Aug 2019 I took on the management of the engineers in the team. I was the first fully remote engineering manager in the company.
This was my opportunity to really strengthen my professional people management skills with good mentors to support me.

During this time I led the development of a server driven UI contract for generating SEO pages, with highly cacheable content.

I also successfully led the backend engineers across the company during a two week sprint to upgrade our Rails Monolith from Rails 4 to 6. With zero downtime for our users.

I led the team to also take our average SEO page speed from 30 to 70. Beating the majority of our competitors.

In May 2019 I took on the role of Tech Lead for the Growth group, leading 3 teams to focus on SEO/Acquisition, tooling for our marketing department and a team introducing a new payment method to the platform.

Joined in 2018 as a staff software engineer for the growth product team. This evolved into creating several foundational pieces to the Airtasker marketplace and its international expansion strategy. Including a SEO landing page generation system and a location system for reverse geocoding.
I was the first full time remote engineer at Airtasker, so I took it upon myself to create the company’s remote work guidelines and help set up practices and equipment in the office that would allow meetings to involve remote participants.

After my stint as a consultant I took on a role as technical advisor to the founder Lisa. Advising her on how to guide a few projects and giving feedback of some of the technical choices that were in front of her.

I joined Roster Right as a senior technical consultant for a short stint while they were bringing on a new permanent employee.
I quickly adapted to their Ruby of Rails with React monolith and delivered a string of value for the users of the platform. I then also technically onboarded the new permanent hire.

I worked as a remote consultant for Apple, leading a team of engineers to develop and maintain a secure platform for thousands of small and large scale events annually. Creating streamlined attendee experiences and supporting them and the organisers with valuable information and communication channels.

We worked with the Technical Training Programs and B2B and Education sales teams to support their events throughout EMEIA, Asia, and North America.

I worked on the underlying server architecture for the platform and helped prepare the platform for the company vision.

I worked closely with the other founders to create an MVP product and present it to a string of Angel investors.

I organised the technical side of the SVC2Lx events program and summits from 2011 to 2012. Cloud services, apps, WiFi, streaming, projection, all the technical plan and tools for enabling the whole team to do their jobs better.

Eventfuel.io is a platform for running live, hybrid and virtual events. I built the first prototype of the platform in 2011 when working as an organiser of Silicon Valley Comes to Lisbon.
For 4 years I ran it as the CEO and co-founder in Lisbon Portugal and saw it become one of the leading event SaaS platforms in Europe. At its peak there were hundreds of events per week running on the platform.
Hundreds of users getting access to invaluable content and context and providing their feedback instantly to the event organisers.
Multiple Fortune 500 companies utilise the platform to run their events.
During 2020 and the Covid-19 pandemic, the events industry was hit hard and Eventfuel.io was no exception. The amazing team have built a virtual events platform, working with event organisers every day to help them build great virtual events.

I worked as a database migration specialist in the department of education. I was responsible for migrating millions of records of data from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005 and then 2008. I updated the databases to be compatible, put tests in place to make sure that data was all migrated successfully, and executed the migrations.

I worked at Insight4 (now part of CapGemini) as a software engineer. I worked on products such as Travellr.com, MitelCallAccounting.com, QuickTimeSheets.com and also worked as a database engineer working for a variety of government departments.

I was the public officer for the non-profit organisation NexusLAN who organised monthly gaming events in Launceston, Australia. We had over 200 regular attendees of the monthly 36 hour events.
I participated in all facets of the event, from setting up the network hardware and servers, to the running of tournaments and managing attendees.

🚀Niko Roberts🇵🇹

About Niko Roberts

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