Mads Villadsen

Engineering Manager

Aarhus, Central Denmark Region, Denmark23 yrs 5 mos experience

Highly Stable

Key Highlights

Proven leader in engineering management across diverse teams.
Expert in scalable platform development and agile methodologies.
Strong focus on improving developer experience and team collaboration.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a SaaS engineering leader with a strong focus on developer experience and scalable architectures.

Contact

Skills

Core Skills

Engineering LeadershipPlatform As A Service (paas)ScalabilityAgile TestingMicroservices

Other Skills

People ManagementTestingLeadershipSpring FrameworkAnsibleWeb ServicesWeb DevelopmentWeb ApplicationsJavaScriptXMLJavaSoftware Architectural DesignLinuxTeam LeadershipProgramming

About

Computer scientist with several years of experience in both the public and private sector. Open Source enthusiast. Project management training and experience. Many years of technical team leadership experience at various companies from startups to multinational corporations - with a focus on agile development as well as taking an active part in system architecture design. Deep experience interacting with full-stack teams comprised of backend developers, frontend developers, data specialists, UX designers, machine learning experts, and more. Experience working both with distributed teams across multiple time zones as well as co-located teams. Has taken part in writing specifications and evaluating several large systems for potential nationwide deployment as well as writing job postings and performing job interviews. Experience with engineering management, performance reviews, 1-on-1s, customer workshops, and more. Focus on diverse teams and agile methods. Great at being the Rubber Duck and assisting people in talking through their problems and finding solutions.

Experience

23 yrs 5 mos

Total Experience

4 yrs 1 mo

Average Tenure

6 mos

Current Experience

Databricks

Engineering Manager

Nov 2025 – Present · 6 mos · Aarhus, Central Denmark Region, Denmark · On-site

Leading a set of onsite engineering teams working on the Runtime Platform at Databricks. Providing tools, capabilities, and platforms for testing, benchmarking, observability, library management, and more for all engineers at Databricks.

Engineering LeadershipPeople ManagementPlatform as a Service (PAAS)Testing

Uber

Engineering Manager

Sep 2024 – Nov 2025 · 1 yr 2 mos · Aarhus, Central Denmark Region, Denmark · On-site

Leading a set of onsite and remote teams within Uber working on the catalog backend powering Uber Eats.
Developing a core platform that is highly scalable, flexible, and reliable.

Engineering LeadershipPeople ManagementScalability

Github

3 roles

Director/Principal Group Engineering Manager

Jun 2023 – Sep 2024 · 1 yr 3 mos

Leading a distributed set of teams within GitHub working on Developer Experience (DX).
Improving the Developer Experience for all internal developers at GitHub. Building platforms and products to help make development faster, simpler, and more delightful.
Special focus on the build and test areas.

LeadershipEngineering LeadershipPeople ManagementAgile Testing

Principal Software Engineering Manager

Mar 2022 – Jun 2023 · 1 yr 3 mos

Leading a distributed team of developers within GitHub working on Developer Experience (DX).
Improving the Developer Experience for all internal developers at GitHub. Building platforms and products to help make development faster, simpler, and more delightful.
Special focus on the delivery lifecycle and feature management.

LeadershipEngineering LeadershipPeople ManagementAgile Testing

Principal Software Engineering Manager

Apr 2020 – Mar 2022 · 1 yr 11 mos

Leading a distributed team of developers within GitHub/Microsoft. Working on the npm package registry.
Involved in a wide range of both user visible features, backend improvements, process changes, etc.
Has been involved with different areas including billing, observability and monitoring, accessibility, on-call processes, and more.

LeadershipEngineering LeadershipPeople ManagementMicroservicesAgile Testing

Microsoft

Principal Software Engineering Manager

Sep 2018 – Apr 2020 · 1 yr 7 mos · Århus Area, Denmark

Leading a distributed team of developers and support staff within Microsoft App Center.
Primary focus on App Center Test which allows for the execution of automated UI tests using different testings frameworks across thousands of physical devices running Android and iOS.
Involved in regular meetings with the rest of the management team to coordinate initiatives as well as align on processes and focus areas.
Focus on learning in the form of frequent pairing, tech talks, retrospectives, live site reviews/blameless post-mortems, etc.

LeadershipEngineering LeadershipPeople ManagementAgile Testing

Unsilo

2 roles

Chief Technical Officer

Promoted

Jun 2016 – Sep 2018 · 2 yrs 3 mos

Performed hiring and helped grow the engineering team as well as the machine learning team. Furthermore hired a small team to focus on DevOps along with monitoring and observability.
Worked closely with PhD student to help focus their direction and help apply the theoretical solutions to concrete business oriented challenges.
Helped prototype and plan the UNSILO Classify product while taking part in customer meetings and workshops.
Worked on the initial prototypes for the UNSILO Evaluate product.

LeadershipSpring FrameworkEngineering LeadershipPeople ManagementAnsibleMicroservices

VP of Development

Oct 2015 – Jun 2016 · 8 mos

Leading UNSILO’s technical planning, development, implementation and testing, providing leadership and technical guidance to all levels of personnel in the technical team.
Helped rewrite and optimize Elasticsearch components and initiated a re-organization and modernization of the company’s main underlying microservices architecture.
Worked on improving relevance in the UNSILO Related product.

LeadershipSpring FrameworkEngineering LeadershipPeople ManagementAnsibleMicroservices

Refind

Co-owner

Feb 2009 – Mar 2011 · 2 yrs 1 mo

Engineering Leadership

Statsbiblioteket

IT Specialist Consultant

Jan 2003 – Oct 2015 · 12 yrs 9 mos · Århus Area, Denmark

Technical project manager for several projects including the Summa project - an integrated search system for libraries.
Also involved in release engineering and establishing procedures for getting products from development to production environments.

Engineering Leadership