Scaling to 100+ as a Director: Lessons From Growing Engineering Organizations

When I took on the Director of Engineering role at Nubank, I had no idea just how many times I’d need to reinvent my leadership style. In the span of three years, my organization grew from 30 engineers to over 100, forcing me to recalibrate everything from meeting structures to team compositions to decision-making frameworks to scale myself.

I remember feeling like I was changing the wheels on a speeding train—trying to keep velocity while fundamentally reworking how we operated.

In this talk, I’ll share the highs, lows, and practical lessons from each year of this journey. We’ll explore the patterns that emerged as I navigated the organizational change: experimenting to find the right team topologies, building the leadership team, and embracing reorganizations as a natural part of scaling.

Key Takeaways:

• Crafting Team Topologies for Scope, Autonomy, and Flow – Strategies for designing focused teams minimizing dependencies to maximize autonomy and flow.
• Up-leveling for Resiliency & Sustainability – How to raise seniority, rotate expertise, and optimize team sizing and tenure distribution to enhance knowledge transfer, reduce silos, and build resilient squads that excel in crisis management, sustain operations, and tackle complex technical challenges.
• Building an Empowered & Coherent Leadership Team – Approaches for spotting and nurturing leaders who can carry the vision & the strategy through multiple layers of the organization.
• Continuous Reorganizations as a Feature, Not a Bug – How to view reorgs as iterative improvements rather than chaotic disruptions, and the communication strategies that make them stick.