Kitty Giraudel

Engineering leader with 15 years of experience, including 7 years in engineering management and 3 in executive leadership. I have helped multiple startups scale their engineering organizations through periods of rapid growth, restructuring, and regulatory pressure.

With a background in frontend development, I bring a strong product mindset and a long-standing focus on quality, accessibility, security, and sustainable engineering practices. I have led departments of up to 35 engineers, supported due diligence and compliance efforts, and partnered closely with product, GTM, and leadership teams to deliver reliably at scale.

Please kindly reach out on LinkedIn for any inquiry. My pronouns are she/her, please kindly respect them.

Technology

HTML, CSS/Sass, JavaScript/TypeScript, React, modern frontend architectures, accessibility, security, GraphQL

Leadership

Engineering management, executive leadership (working with investors, due diligence), effective hiring, team building, engineering growth, understanding of regulations (fintech and medtech)

Other skills

Documentation (tech-writer and passionate), software testing, workplace safety (minorly involved in N26 Works Council formation), agile practices (knowledgeable)

Selected impact: scaled engineering organizations to 35+ people · led department multi-region reorganizations · supported due diligence and compliance initiatives · established engineering standards and practices · operated in regulated environments

VP of Engineering @ Scilife Berlin, 2024–2026

• Reorganized the technology department from location-based silos (India/Europe) to cross-functional teams
• Hired Engineers and Engineering Managers to accompany the department restructuration
• Implemented engineering practices such as code reviews, unit testing and RFC processes
• Established processes to interface with other teams (e.g. GTM) including SLAs and expectations
• Supported the product strategy and its roadmap with engineering estimations and planning
• Sponsored security initiatives such as internal audits and external penetration tests

VP of Engineering @ Cofenster Berlin, 2022–2024

• Brought software engineering maturity and processes to the team
• Organised the Product & Engineering team in cross-functional squads to improve delivery
• Championed quality topics such as security, scaling, accessibility and compliance
• Maintained and actively contributed to company-wide documentation, particularly about culture, product and engineering
• Supported technical initiatives such as compliance and ISO-27001 certification acquisition
• Contributed to the product roadmap and strategy as well as its implementation
• Took over hiring and onboarding for engineering roles

Group Engineering Lead @ Gorillas Berlin, 2021–2022

• Helped grow the Product, Design & Engineering organization from a few dozens to over 200 people
• Established processes and guidelines for the department (most notably the 360 feedback process, but also absence policies, engineering practices, IT and security guidelines…)
• Championed accessibility, diversity and inclusion, as well as workspace safety in the organization
• Supported officializing the use of the culture-add interview for all roles and helped design and conduct that interview stage
• Designed the interviewing process for web engineers (through which over a dozen hires took place), and helped hiring tech recruiters and group leads
• Worked with the security team to enable relevant policies and guidelines for the department
• Took part in Due Diligence exercises to audit the quality of the organization’ SDLC, architecture and security practices

Lead Web Engineer @ Gorillas Berlin, 2021–2021

• Hired as one of the first engineers to build up the Product, Design & Engineering organization at a time where there wasn’t one
• Grew the web team to over 10 engineers, whose seniority levels spread from junior to engineering lead
• Defined the early web infrastructure such as the adoption of Next.js, Sanity, Cypress, Fela and other frameworks and technologies
• Championed accessibility, testing and security in all web projects
• Championed diversity and inclusion at the organization level to ensure it grows in solid and healthy foundations

Web Tech Lead @ N26 GmbH Berlin, 2018–2020

• Grew the web team from 1 to 25+ engineers, now in 4 different offices over the world
• Built a culture of feedback, inclusion and respect, now powering a very diverse and high-performing team
• Designed and implemented a test automation strategy and deployment pipeline to release multiple projects on a daily basis

Senior Frontend Developer @ N26 GmbH Berlin, 2016–2018

• Set up the groundwork for all N26 customer-facing web projects to ever come, now supporting the marketing website, the support center, the N26 webapp, the signup process and more
• Installed high quality practices such as security, accessibility and testability, shared with all members of the web team and beyond
• Initiated the web docs hub and wrote most of the existing documentation (70,000+ words)

Web Developer @ Edenspiekermann Berlin, 2015–2016

• Worked on a variety of frontend client contracts, including RedBull projects
• Paired with designers on a regular basis to ensure consistency between design deliveries and final implementations
• Encouraged authoring guidelines and practices across the organization, especially around CSS
• Started the Edenspiekermann dev blog

Web Developer @ Crédit Agricole Grenoble, 2011–2015

• Implemented frontend of a now-retired e-commerce platform

Notable open-source projects

• a11y-dialog, a script to make modal dialogs accessible to assistive technology users
• Sass Guidelines, an opinionated styleguide for writing sane, maintainable and scalable Sass translated in 13 languages
• SassDoc, a documentation system for Sass similar to JSDoc for JavaScript
• Browserhacks, an extensive list of browser-specific hacks
• Simplified JavaScript Jargon, a community-driven attempt at explaining JavaScript concepts and buzzwords
• Find more open-source contributions from me

Publications

• Jump Start Sass (© 2016, Learnable Editions)
• CSS 3 Pratique du Design Web (© 2014, Eyrolles Editions)

Honor & Awards

• Former Google Developer Expert in Web Technologies
• Web Developer of the Year 2015 Nominee
• Open Source Xena Awards 2023 Nominee