Looking for a job

Ilan Steemers

@ilansteemers

25 years of engineering leadership. I join at the inflection point — when the old way of running engineering stops working — and fix it.

Spain

Message

What I'm looking for

I’m looking for a Head, Director, VP, or CTO role, fully remote from Spain, where I can embed AI into products and pipelines and help teams ship continuously with strong DevOps practices.

I've spent 25 years doing one thing in different contexts: walking into engineering organisations that aren't working well and making them work. That means different things each time — replacing a failing inherited platform from scratch, decomposing a monolith into independently deployable services, taking teams from monthly releases to daily, or building a function from zero headcount to a mature organisation with real engineering culture.

Most recently, as Director of Engineering at HSP, I rebuilt the entire platform end-to-end, shipped a production AI pipeline processing thousands of payslips globally with zero manual intervention, and built a developer toolchain where AI keeps documentation, tickets, and product context in sync automatically. Not as a proof of concept — running in production.

Before that, Head of Engineering at NewStore (omnichannel retail SaaS, Berlin), scaling one team to three, and before that, building the entire medical platform at Medbelle from zero. Earlier still, CTO at Perdoo, where I worked on NLP model trained on tens of thousands of OKRs and built the platform and team from scratch.

I'm based in Valencia, Spain, working fully remote. Dutch national with EU work rights. I tend to join companies at an inflection point — when the way engineering has been run stops working at the next stage of scale. That's where I'm most useful.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Director of Engineering

HSP Officia Global

Apr 2024 - Apr 2026 (2 years)

Evaluated and replaced a failing inherited HR & payroll SaaS platform, onboarding and delivering a new SaaS architecture from scratch after offboarding the incumbent team. Rebuilt delivery with continuous deployment (monthly to weekly/daily), shipped an AI payslip processing pipeline for thousands of template types, and architected security/permissions with Cerbos while migrating cloud infrastructure from Google Cloud to Azure.

Microservices Architecture CI CD Feature Flagging Contract Testing Azure Infrastructure Cerbos Security Developer Toolchain Automation Kubernetes DevOps Foundations AI document processing

Head of Engineering

NewStore

Jun 2021 - Mar 2024 (2 years 9 months)

Scaled engineering from one team to three domain vertical teams (cloud infrastructure, DevOps/API, mobile) and drove decomposition of a monolithic platform into domain-aligned services. Transitioned delivery from monthly Scrum to Kanban continuous delivery with feature flagging, enabling weekly and daily releases while reducing inter-team dependencies and UAT bottlenecks.

Kanban Continuous Delivery Feature Flagging Microservices Decomposition Go TypeScript Python Swift Kubernetes AWS

Manager, Engineering Teams

Park Now (BMW Group)

Mar 2021 - Jun 2021 (3 months)

Managed nearshoring teams and grew DevOps, engineering, and data capabilities using .NET Core, Python, Argo, Kubernetes, Go, and AWS. Introduced continuous delivery practices and OKR training, moving release cadence from bi-monthly to weekly.

.NET Core Python Kubernetes Go AWS Continuous Delivery OKR Implementation Team Management ArgoCD

Head of Engineering

Medbelle

Dec 2017 - Feb 2021 (3 years 2 months)

Built the engineering team and entire online hospital platform from zero, covering the full patient journey across four interconnected products. Designed and delivered the full stack on Django, Python, GraphQL (Apollo), React.js, and Next.js, establishing continuous delivery practices and growing the team to a fully operational function over three years.

Django Python GraphQL Apollo React.js Next.js CI CD Cloud Infrastructure Engineering Team Building ReactJS

CTO / Chief Architect

Perdoo

Nov 2015 - Nov 2017 (2 years)

Progressed from Chief Architect to CTO, leading SaaS and mobile development on Django, React.js, React Native, Node.js, and Heroku while driving end-to-end product delivery. Built an NLP model that analysed OKR objective/key-result text using tens of thousands of OKRs to generate actionable quality/strength advice.

Django React Native Node.js Heroku NLP OKR Analytics DevOps Culture NodeJS SaaS architecture ReactJS

Freelance Internet Architect

Ilan Works

Jan 2010 - Jan 2015 (5 years)

Delivered freelance internet architecture work focused on large-scale distributed systems and database design. Provided full-stack engineering across C#, Python, JavaScript, C++, Objective-C, and Java.