Technical Lead | Santander

Scaling a high-performing engineering team for a global banking leader.

Overview

At ISBAN (Santander's technology arm), I had two jobs: solve the technical bottleneck of launching new products, and keep a rapidly growing team from falling apart.

Challenges

• Reinvention: Every new financial product required a fresh implementation. We were repeating ourselves constantly.
• Growing Pains: The team went from 8 to over 20 developers. Managing that kind of growth without losing quality is hard.
• Old meets New: Trying to get modern frontend frameworks to talk nicely with heavy backend legacy systems.

Solution

Configurable Engine: I designed an architecture where business rules were data, not code. This meant the bank could 'configure' a new product rather than building it from scratch.

Team Culture: You can't manage 22 people the same way you manage 8. I established code reviews, quality gates, and clear roles so the team could run itself.

Results

• Speed: New product launches stopped being a months-long development slog.
• Scaling: We successfully integrated a dozen new developers without the project running off the rails.
• Consistency: Whether you walked into a branch or used the app, the business logic was the same.