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Sam Donnelley

@samdonnelley

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Senior executive building AI-driven, cloud-native products and high-performance engineering cultures.

Spain

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What I'm looking for

I’m looking to lead technology and product organizations where AI and platform modernization drive measurable growth, while I can build high-performance delivery cultures with operational excellence, reliability targets, and strong cross-functional execution.

I’m a senior technology and product executive with 20+ years building and scaling global software organizations across platform engineering, AI-driven systems, regulated financial services, and consumer e-commerce. I’ve founded and led Madrid engineering hubs for Amazon and Teya, partnering with C-level leadership to drive organizational transformation, operational excellence, and sustainable growth.

Most recently, as an executive leader reporting to the CTO at Teya, I led an AI-centric organization spanning full-stack engineering, machine learning, and data science across Customer Onboarding, Due Diligence, Risk Monitoring, and Pricing Intelligence. I scaled onboarding and due-diligence gross adds by 135% year-over-year in H1 2025 via AI-enabled automation, launched in-house AI document processing (text extraction, recognition, and tamper detection), introduced predictive ML for pricing decisions, and led evaluation and integration planning for a third-party AI risk platform supporting fraud and money-laundering detection.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Director, AI Engineering

Teya

Apr 2025 - Jan 2026 (9 months)

Led an AI-centric development organization spanning full-stack engineering, machine learning, and data science for customer onboarding, due diligence, risk monitoring, and pricing intelligence. Scaled customer onboarding and due-diligence gross adds by 135% year-over-year in H1 2025 and introduced AI-driven document processing with tamper detection plus a predictive ML pricing workflow and third-p

Machine Learning Data Science Document Processing Risk Monitoring Customer Due Diligence Pricing Intelligence Full Stack Engineering

Director, Payment Acceptance

Teya

May 2023 - Mar 2025 (1 year 10 months)

Founded and led the Madrid Development Hub (25 FTE) and owned e-commerce platform delivery responsible for approximately 20% of global payment volume. Increased operational maturity to 99.9% reliability targets and modernized a 20+ year legacy platform to a cloud-native architecture using Java, Spring Boot, Kafka, Prometheus, and Grafana.

Java Spring Boot Kafka Reliability Engineering SLOs Platform Modernization

Sr. Manager, Software Dev

Amazon.com

Feb 2018 - Apr 2023 (5 years 2 months)

Helped grow the Madrid Kindle development center from 0 to 200+ employees in 2 years and served as acting site leader coordinating ~200 technical contributors. Led engineering and QA for Kindle Library and Reading Experience across e-ink and iOS/Android/Fire tablets, serving tens of millions of monthly active users.

Java C#Kotlin Swift Objective C Mobile Development QA Leadership Platform Engineering

Sr. Manager TPM and PM

Amazon.com

Oct 2015 - Jan 2018 (2 years 3 months)

Led Technical Program Managers and Product Managers across five publishing development teams. Delivered publishing contract and royalty modeling, a re-imagined best-seller list, and a crowd-sourced publishing platform while owning roadmap planning, cross-team goal setting, infrastructure coordination, information security, and patent tracking.

Technical Program Management Product Management Roadmap Planning Information Security Royalty Models

Technical Program Manager

Amazon.com

Oct 2008 - Sep 2015 (6 years 11 months)

Launched Kindle Worlds, creating a new digital publishing category and royalty model, and reduced repeatable development effort for new Amazon sites by 81% in the first year. Owned technical design and roadmap for new retail systems for fashion product planning and supported the Amazon.it launch, reducing development work for new country launches by 47%.

Technical Program Management Launch Management Royalty Models Roadmapping Project Management