Engineering Spotlight: Homero Valle
By: Tomas Haviar
Tags: Infrastructure, DevOps, Spotlight, Engineering, Site Reliability

Homero is our Infrastructure Lead. His journey began back in 2018 and since then he has seen Mollie grow from 60 to 300 people. Take a look at his story and what that growth meant for him and his team.

Homero Valle, Infrastructure Lead

Joining Mollie

In the early months of 2018, I was looking for a new challenge. I had been previously working in a very nice company that had brought me to beautiful Amsterdam, but I was hungry for a new challenge and personal growth.

Initially, I had in my scope joining a different company, a company I had heard good things about, and knew some people working there. My main motivation was culture and challenge. So I applied.

I applied for a leadership position but did not get it. I was then referred by them to a recruiter in Mollie, then things really kicked off from there. I still did not get a leadership position, but I joined a team of 2 system engineers with some of the best discipline and intelligence I’ve seen.

Mollie seemed like this mystical land of nice people, hard problems to solve, and just a great attitude. For me, it was an excellent match back then.

So my journey began by becoming a System Engineer at the Platforms team. We had (and still have) a lot of interesting and hard challenges. How do we ensure stability and reliability while growing fast?

Our biggest challenge was setting up Mollie for scale in a reliable manner, and thus I had an interest in leading the cloud migration. Fortunately, after 1 year, I had the privilege to take the lead within the Platforms team and continue this migration forward.

Grow at Mollie

When I joined we were a mere 60 people in Mollie. We used to fit in two floors of an office space in Keizersgracht, but that did not last long. We hired, and hired and hired. Now we are more than 300 people.

In the Platforms team, we’ve also grown quickly. Two years ago we were 3 people and now we are a whopping 14 people. This has naturally triggered a team split which is exciting and a bit sad at the same time. We need to keep organizing ourselves to scale and to serve our customers while being super focused on being reliable and ready for growth.

During my time in the Platforms team, I grew both personally and professionally. I learned some hard lessons of hypergrowth and had the amazing privilege of leading the team through this. My interest expanded from scaling technology into scaling organizations and teams. It’s hard to grow teams and maintain cohesion, culture and stay productive.

With scale, opportunities showed up fast and I had to adapt and learn on the go. I must admit it wasn’t easy. You need some sort of thick skin to survive this and make it part of you.

The platform's team, now part of the Infrastructure domain, is an amazing group of people with all kinds of skills, with all types of backgrounds and nationalities, and it goes without saying some of the nicest and professional people I’ve worked with.

The culture of our team is based around trust and friendship. We are all people with different characteristics and we try to make the best of that.

On a personal level

I love outdoor activities, fresh air is amazing to have a clear mind and relax. I like rock climbing, mountain biking, running or just playing football with the Mollies. In contrast, I also like automation, it’s in my blood. I am an avid home automation enthusiast trying to automate my living space away.

As mentioned earlier, we are growing a lot. We want to keep supporting both our engineers, but also our Mollie users, which we love. I believe that success comes as a result of having happy and motivated people, starting in your own team.

I want to continue building cool technology. But most importantly, I want to build amazing teams of people.

Homero is currently looking for new team members, take a look at the open positions on his team HERE.

Interested in more engineering spotlights? Check out more stories of our engineers!