Tala AlKuwari

S

Senior Engineering Manager at BlaBlaCar | ex-Roche

BlaBlaCar
Lisbon, Portugal · WET (UTC+0)
11+ years experience
École Polytechnique
English, Portuguese
Co-founder
Messaging unavailable

Overview

I've spent 15 years on API platforms - first at Adyen, now at BlaBlaCar. Grew the public API team from 3 to 23 engineers. Chess on lunch breaks.

Good reasons to reach out
  • People who want to build this with me
  • Speaking or podcast invitations
  • Second opinions on Redis decisions
Please don't message about
  • Recruiters for roles outside my stack
  • Requests to fix your code for free
  • SEO and link-building offers

Replies between meetings, usually same day

Skills
PythonOpenAPIRedisDjangoPostgreSQLREST
Co-founderLooking for a co-founder
closes in 3 months

Looking for an ML-focused co-founder for cash-flow forecasting for insurers

The idea
Looking for an ML-focused co-founder for cash-flow forecasting for insurers
Stage
Early revenue
I bring
8 years in API platforms
Looking for
Technical co-founder who has shipped B2B software
Commitment
Full-time now
Location
Lisbon or remote

I bring 15 years of API platforms (currently BlaBlaCar). Ideally you've sold to enterprises. Have a working prototype and design partners.

Lisbon, Portugalopenapipostgresqlredis
Open

Experience

  1. Senior Engineering Manager
    Mar 2026 - Present
    BlaBlaCar · 7 mo · Full-time · Lisbon, Portugal
    • Built the experimentation framework 9 product teams use to ship changes safely.
    • Shipped 12 launches on the public API team without a rollback.
  2. Staff Backend Engineer
    Jun 2022 - Mar 2026
    Roche · 3 yr 9 mo · Full-time · Lisbon, Portugal
    • Led the migration of 65 services to Redis.
    • Built the experimentation framework 27 product teams use to ship changes safely.
  3. Staff Backend Engineer
    Nov 2018 - Feb 2022
    Just Eat Takeaway · 3 yr 3 mo · Full-time · Lisbon, Portugal
    • Grew the public API team from 4 to 13 engineers.
  4. Engineering Manager
    Feb 2017 - Nov 2018
    BNP Paribas · 1 yr 9 mo · Full-time · Lisbon, Portugal
    • Wrote the PostgreSQL service that now handles 67 million requests a day.
  5. Backend Engineer
    Jul 2015 - Feb 2017
    Adyen · 1 yr 7 mo · Full-time · Lisbon, Portugal
    • Shipped 23 launches on the public API team without a rollback.

Projects

Conference talk: lessons from public API
2026

What went wrong and what worked while scaling API platforms.

Side project: a habit tracker
2025

Built with Redis and REST. 1840 people used it last year.

References

No references yet.

Education

  1. École Polytechnique
    Ingénieur, Electrical Engineering
    2007 - 2011

Details

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