CV Guillem Fernandez
Engineering Director
I define myself as a People Engineer. I’ve been involved in IT Engineering since I left College. I’ve founded two companies, helped create two more from zero to success, and been involved in many other initiatives. I am teaching at University of Barcelona because I love to share my experience. In general I love challenges.
Work Experience
Head of Engineering - 2025 - Present
Advance 52 - G+D Company
As Head of Product Development, with a team of four direct reports and twenty-five indirect reports, my primary responsibilities include:
- 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 into product development, increasing release reliability and shortening time-to-market.
Core Competencies: Product Development, Product Tech Debt, Team Escalation, Development Processes Definition, Strategic Planning, and Team Mentorship.
Head of Transformation - 2024 - 2025
Allianz Technology Iberolatam
As a Transformation & Operations Lead (Fixed-Term Project) at Allianz Technology Iberolatam, I spearheaded the strategic redesign of development and testing capabilities. My mission was to transition the regional IT organization toward a modern, product-oriented model, enhancing delivery predictability and technical scalability.
Key Responsibilities & Achievements:
- Organizational Transformation: Conducted a comprehensive assessment of development squads and manual testing teams. Identified structural bottlenecks and reconfigured teams into product-aligned structures to establish clear ownership and streamlined workflows.
- Agile Leadership: Defined and implemented a robust agile working framework. Mentored newly appointed Team Leads and shaped long-term delivery strategies for core products to ensure alignment with global business goals.
- Legacy Modernization Strategy: Led the architectural evolution of the company’s primary COBOL monolith. I defined the transition to a Java-based microservices architecture, ensuring a future-ready ecosystem.
- Strategic Roadmap Design: Developed a pragmatic, multi-year roadmap for legacy transformation that prioritized business continuity. This included:
- Defining domain decomposition and service boundaries.
- Establishing coexistence strategies between legacy COBOL and modern Java services.
- Designing a long-term maintenance plan for platform scalability and continuous evolution.
- Tech Stack Optimization: Contributed to the definition and rollout of the target technology stack, focusing on improving maintainability and accelerating the time-to-market for digital initiatives.
Core Competencies: IT Transformation, Agile Frameworks, Legacy Decoupling (COBOL to Java), Microservices Architecture, Strategic Planning, and Team Mentorship.
Engineering Manager - 2020 - Present
BUMBLE / Barcelona, Spain
- Being part of the Friendship business line in Bumble, I am in charge of a team of engineers coming from different backgrounds.
- The goal in this position has been to create high performance and cohered teams, built on the concept of independence, good practices and commitment with the project.
CEO & Cofounder - 2019 - 2022
CoKaiDo / Barcelona, Spain
- I founded this company in 2019. My role as CEO in this project was to drive the business to become the most successful company in expert and high-level training and help our clients to get ownership of the expertise and best practices.
- I created CoKaiDo as the central source of improvement for companies that wanted to go one step forward and build high performance teams.
Managing Director - 2016 - 2019
Codurance / Barcelona, Spain
- As a Managing Director I am responsible of running Barcelona Codurance’s office, taking care of business operations and provide consultancy and training services to our clients.
- Our daily work is based in helping our customer to acquire the necessary skill to be able to work applying engineering best practices.
Previous experiences
Senior Lead Developer - PaddyPower 2015 - 2016
Senior Lead Developer - Stella&Dot 2013 - 2015
Senior iOS Developer - Freelance 2012 - 2013
Mobile Team Lead - HostelWorld 2012 - 2012
Senior iOS Developer - ISIS Papyrus 2011 - 2012
CTO & HR Manager - Arestes 2009 - 2011
Business Manager - Alten TIC 2008 - 2009
See details and more at LinkedIn