Steven Syrek

Director of Engineering

Berlin, Germany7 yrs 10 mos experience

AI ML PractitionerAI Enabled

Key Highlights

Led major initiatives at DeepL to scale AI coding practices.
Founded multiple tech meetups and conferences in Berlin.
Advanced experimentation programs significantly at HelloFresh.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a SaaS expert with a strong focus on engineering leadership and data-driven decision making.

Contact

Skills

Core Skills

Engineering LeadershipProject ManagementTeam ManagementSoftware DevelopmentA/b Testing

Other Skills

People ManagementCloud ComputingEvent OrganizationData GovernanceAgile MethodologiesCoaching & MentoringDomain-Driven Design (DDD)Event StormingClaude CodeInterpersonal SkillsWritingResearchEditingTechnical WritingProofreading

About

Engineering leader who builds teams and systems at the intersection of product, data, and commercial strategy. At DeepL, I led procurement of an experimentation and feature flagging platform, developed a partnerships engineering function from scratch, launched a major new enterprise marketplace channel, redesigned the software engineer hiring process, and scaled AI coding tools and practices org-wide. Previously spent four years advancing the experimentation program at HelloFresh. Dual US/German citizen based in Berlin. Founded the Berlin Functional Programming Group, the Berlin Collaborative Modeling Meetup, and >prompt, a conference for AI-assisted software engineering. Founder and chief instructor of Aikido Kokikai Berlin (5th degree black belt), the first Kokikai dojo in Europe.

Experience

7 yrs 10 mos

Total Experience

3 yrs

Average Tenure

1 yr 10 mos

Current Experience

Deepl

3 roles

Senior Engineering Manager

Promoted

Mar 2026 – Present · 2 mos · Remote

Leading Partnerships Tech, focused on scaling DeepL's cloud marketplace, reseller, and enterprise partner ecosystem.
Continuing to evolve the company's hiring process by procuring new tools and adapting interviews for the AI age.
Conceived and organized >prompt, an AI-assisted software engineering conference in Berlin sponsored by DeepL, Anthropic, Parloa, Bruin and Merantix AI Campus, featuring DeepL's CEO and Founder as keynote speaker (April 2026).

People ManagementEngineering LeadershipProject ManagementCloud Computing

Engineering Manager - Partnerships Tech

Aug 2025 – Feb 2026 · 6 mos · Remote

Built the Partnerships Tech team from scratch and stabilized delivery across multiple concurrent workstreams despite staffing constraints and evolving dependencies.
Launched DeepL on AWS Marketplace ahead of schedule, establishing a new enterprise GTM channel and directly enabling the close and expansion of the largest API deal in company history.
Delivered a prototype for Voice for Conversations on web to meet an urgent partnership deadline, later extended to serve as a homepage demo and driving a significant conversion rate uplift on deepl.com.
Automated a manual partner provisioning process, removing a structural bottleneck to reseller scaling and enabling a multi-million-euro revenue target for 2026.
Launched and scaled an org-wide effort to adopt better tools and practices for AI coding, reaching 500+ active users across engineering, research, and adjacent functions, and established a strategic vendor relationship with a major foundation model provider.
Independently built and open sourced DeepL CLI, a comprehensive implementation of the DeepL API for command line and agentic use.

Team ManagementA/B TestingSoftware DevelopmentCloud Computing

Engineering Manager - Experimentation and Product Data

May 2024 – Jul 2025 · 1 yr 2 mos · Remote

Led two sub-teams in DeepL's data organization: Experimentation and Product Data.
Evolved the in-house A/B testing solution to support B2B, enterprise release management, and marketing campaign strategies, including leadership of buy vs. build decisions.
Rebuilt client-side event tracking architecture for scalability, data quality, and an improved experience for internal customers.
Drove improvements to data quality and governance for core product performance metrics.
Directed a project to refactor web integration with experimentation and CDN services, resulting in 10% greater reach for experiment participation, improved website latency and availability, and a 50% reduction in TTFB for more effective SEO reach.
Led evaluation, selection, and procurement of the company's unified experimentation and feature flags platform, replacing a fragmented internal stack and aligning with a new cloud-based data architecture.
Designed the hiring processes for software and data engineers org-wide, including structure and content of interview rounds, onboarding of interviewers, and playbooks for all roles and levels.
Served as hiring manager for the US-based API team (4 engineers, mid through staff level), supporting a business line that grew 200% YoY in 2025.

Team ManagementA/B TestingData GovernanceSoftware Development

Hellofresh

Engineering Manager - Experimentation

May 2020 – Apr 2024 · 3 yrs 11 mos · Berlin, Germany

Built an in-house experimentation platform with a distributed domain-driven architecture, in order to accelerate data-driven decision making across the product organization.
Grew the team from one to two squads, directly managing up to 9 ICs (engineers and data scientists) before promoting an EM and splitting into a two-team structure, with 12 people in total.
Increased the average number of experiments created annually by 133% in the first three years and the number of core product KPIs available for measuring business impact by 500%.
Designed and launched a bar raiser program to improve the quality of the experimentation process globally.
Successfully planned and executed a migration from an in-house experimentation tool to a third-party platform, to better meet the needs of internal customers.
Coached and successfully promoted 6 ICs across two teams, including an EM and one Staff Engineer. Sourced and hired the company's first backend engineer intern.
Ran a company-wide engineering showcase called Geek Friday, in which engineers demoed their latest work and I facilitated an AMA-style discussion with senior tech leadership.
Tech: TypeScript, React, Next.js, Python, FastAPI, Go | AWS, Kubernetes, Delta Lake | Optimizely, Statsig, PyMC

Team ManagementSoftware DevelopmentProject Management

Tier mobility

Senior Software Developer

Feb 2020 – Apr 2020 · 2 mos · Berlin Metropolitan Area

• Contributed to internal operations tooling and led migration of backend services to TypeScript.

Software DevelopmentAgile Methodologies

Blacklane

2 roles

Senior Frontend Engineer

Promoted

Jun 2019 – Jan 2020 · 7 mos

Assembled a team to prototype a next-generation, microservices-based architecture; developed a GraphQL service and trained engineers across the company on the technology.
Organized a company-wide "science fair" event to showcase technical work and its potential for business impact.

Software DevelopmentAgile Methodologies

Frontend Engineer

Nov 2017 – May 2019 · 1 yr 6 mos

Advocated for and initiated a new design system for our frontend teams, which contributed to the successful completion of a major rebranding project.
Led adoption of TypeScript across all frontend teams and revived the frontend tech radar to establish a unified technical vision.

Software DevelopmentAgile Methodologies