Niilo Säämänen

CTO

Helsinki, Uusimaa, Finland21 yrs 10 mos experience

Most Likely To SwitchHighly Stable

Key Highlights

Scaled engineering teams from 10 to over 700.
Expert in user experience and product design.
Servant leadership with a focus on team autonomy.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a SaaS-focused technology leader with extensive experience in user experience and team scaling.

Contact

Skills

Other Skills

LoveUser ExperienceUser Interface DesignInteraction DesignWeb DevelopmentWeb DesignUsabilityUser Experience DesignGraphic DesignMobile ApplicationsUser InterfaceWeb ApplicationsMobile DevicesUser-centered DesignScrum

About

I create world class products, relish quality engineering, scale teams of unparalleled talent, nurture road-maps, dance with deadlines, develop shiny user experiences and talk too much. I'm an experienced leader with a focus in culture lead organisations, relentless autonomy of teams and servant leadership. I believe in hiring the best and giving them both the power and responsibility to change the world. Having scaled product & engineering organisations from 10->700+ has taught me a thing or two about how to get the right talent, retain them, as well as building for scale with technology and culture in mind. I've built products, lead teams and ramped up competences for the largest IT company in the Nordics, a world class engineering benchmark company and currently try to make sense of the future of food digitisation and delivery alongside a killer bunch of people at Wolt. I started from doing web pages aged 14, hosted radio shows, made silly backends and beautiful frontends, crafted great desktop products and dabbled in building a cognitive multiplayer FPS game platform, among other things.

Experience

21 yrs 10 mos

Total Experience

5 yrs 11 mos

Average Tenure

10 yrs 4 mos

Current Experience

Wolt

4 roles

CTO

Promoted

Nov 2021 – Present · 4 yrs 6 mos

Focusing on scaling our 700+ Woltians in Engineering to the best we can be. The shiniest of hats, the same grand adventure.

VP Engineering

Promoted

Dec 2018 – Nov 2021 · 2 yrs 11 mos

Focusing on scaling our 250+ Woltians in Engineering to the best we can be. New shiny hat, same grand adventure.

Head Of Engineering

Promoted

Sep 2017 – Dec 2018 · 1 yr 3 mos

Ramped up Engineering, Analytics, Design and Product management functions and culture. Forging the way forward in how we do things, how we ship things and how we improve as people. Recruiting world class talent, building teams and ways of working, codifying culture and best practices to ensure happy and performing people.

Engineering Lead

Jan 2016 – Sep 2017 · 1 yr 8 mos

Feb 2017 - Sep 2017 Engineering Lead, Customer Team, Merchant Team
Running the engineering team building Wolt products for iOS, Android and the modern web. Making sure we ship the right things with the right feel, actively contributing to the development of our core products. No worries, it's still mostly coding!
Jan 2016 - Feb 2017 Software Engineer, Chapter Lead Web
Crafting with care the Wolt web presence. From tweaking lovely UX patterns to making tiny physics particle engines for emoji explosions to deep diving into modern React-Redux-Isomorphic end user application architecture. Running the web competence.

Futuremark corporation

User Experience Lead

Mar 2012 – Jan 2016 · 3 yrs 10 mos · Espoo

Ran a team of designers and developers building all customer facing interfaces from native iOS and Android to desktop to web. Responsible for the User Experience design and development throughout the product spectrum at Futuremark. From 3DMark on desktop to Android / iOS versions, PCMark and online services.

Tieto

2 roles

Senior User Experience Designer, RIA Lead

Promoted

Jun 2010 – Mar 2012 · 1 yr 9 mos

I started a new team focusing on rich interfaces, developed sales materials and ensured we got to work on interesting projects. Focused on shipping world class UX ranging from mobile prototyping to serious data visualisation brilliance and all the things in between.

Flash Developer

Jun 2007 – Jun 2010 · 3 yrs

I worked with various Flash(AS3) and Flex oriented projects. Complete AS3 based solutions from web apps to mobile products. Physics and 3d-environments with a dose of random generated graphics and I’m happy.

Fjord

Technical Designer

Sep 2006 – Jun 2007 · 9 mos

I worked with various innovative user interfaces and technical solutions. Results varied from purely web-oriented solutions to mobile prototypes. Also did some interesting things with multitouch touchscreens and interactive installations.

Metropolia ammattikorkeakoulu - helsinki metropolia university of applied sciences

Teacher

Sep 2005 – Jun 2008 · 2 yrs 9 mos

The technologies ranged from standard web technologies to media technologies such as video editing and audio engineering. Some courses were full on teaching, and I also lead some project courses, helping the students to get clients for their projects and assisting in whatever technology they had issues with.
I taught courses such as Interactive Web Application, Multimedia product, Basics of Web Development and Introduction to Media Technology. For the Web Development I also developed my own teaching materials.

Frozen ink design

Lord of Lemmings

Jul 2004 – Jul 2017 · 13 yrs

I did some interesting work on the side; built a cognitive game engine with algorithm based creature rendering, worked with a Unity multiplayer FPS/RTS hybrid that aims to help depression, built varied and vivid programmatic animations and graphics generation, played with Box2d and physics, forayed into desktop software and had fun, learned and grew.