Guillem Fernandez

I define myself as a People Engineer: someone who treats the human side of engineering with the same rigor as the technical side. I've founded two companies, helped grow two more from zero to success, and led engineering organizations across startups, scale-ups and global enterprises. I also teach at the Universitat de Barcelona because I love to share what I've learned. In general, I love challenges.

Work experience

2025 — Present
Head of Product Development
Advance 52 · G+D Company

Leading a team of four direct reports and twenty-five indirect reports across product development.

  • Lead end-to-end product development transformation, turning a fragmented setup into a high-performance Continuous Delivery organization.
  • Unify Munich and Barcelona into a single product development engine, enabling rapid scaling without losing culture or quality.
  • Design and run a hybrid model of product teams and delivery squads, balancing roadmap ownership with fast, project-based execution.
  • Partner with executive leadership to align product development with strategic KPIs, ensuring investment focuses on the highest-impact initiatives.
  • Build and scale the Barcelona product development hub, delivering the Digital Euro initiative and expanding global product capacity.
  • Embed CI/CD, TDD and quality-first practices, increasing release reliability and shortening time-to-market.
2024 — 2025
Head of Transformation & Operations
Allianz Technology Iberolatam

Fixed-term project spearheading the strategic redesign of development and testing capabilities, moving the regional IT organization toward a modern, product-oriented model.

  • Organizational transformation: assessed development squads and manual testing teams, identified structural bottlenecks, and reconfigured teams into product-aligned structures.
  • Agile leadership: defined and implemented a robust agile working framework and mentored newly appointed Team Leads.
  • Legacy modernization strategy: led the architectural evolution of the company's primary COBOL monolith, defining the transition to Java-based microservices.
  • Strategic roadmap design: multi-year roadmap for legacy transformation — domain decomposition, coexistence strategies, long-term maintenance plan.
  • Tech stack optimization: contributed to the target technology stack definition and rollout.
2020 — 2024
Head of Engineering
Bumble · Barcelona, Spain

Part of the Friendship business line, leading a team of engineers from diverse backgrounds.

  • Built high-performance, cohesive teams grounded in independence, good practices and commitment.
2019 — 2020
CEO & Co-founder
CoKaiDo · Barcelona, Spain

Founded in 2019. Drove the business into expert-level training, helping clients take ownership of engineering expertise and best practices as a central source of improvement for high-performance teams.

2016 — 2019
Managing Director
Codurance · Barcelona, Spain

Responsible for running the Barcelona office — business operations, consultancy and training services — helping customers acquire modern engineering best practices.

2015 — 2016
Senior Lead Engineer
PaddyPower
2013 — 2015
Senior Lead Engineer
Stella&Dot
2012 — 2013
Senior iOS Developer
Freelance
2012
Mobile Team Lead
HostelWorld
2011 — 2012
Senior iOS Developer
ISIS Papyrus
2009 — 2011
CTO & HR Manager
Arestes
2008 — 2009
Business Manager
Alten TIC

Core competencies

Leadership & Strategy

Team & org design Strategic planning Team mentorship Agile frameworks Stakeholder management Hiring & interviewing

Technical

Software architecture Legacy decoupling (COBOL → Java) Microservices CI/CD & DevOps TDD / quality practices Full-stack development

Education & languages

Grado en Ingeniería de SoftwareUniversitat Politècnica de Catalunya (1991 — 1996)
LanguagesSpanish & Catalan (native), English (C2), French (A2)
TeachingUniversitat de Barcelona

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