Nine Months, Three Chapters
If you had asked me two years ago whether I'd walk away from a Director of Engineering role I genuinely loved, I'd have laughed. But here I am, nine months later, writing this from a completely different chair — smaller team, different stack, different industry — and feeling more alive professionally than I have in years.
Let me walk you through the three chapters.
Chapter One: Benevity
Almost three years. That's how long I spent building the engineering organisation at Benevity's Barcelona office. For those unfamiliar, Benevity operates in the CSR space — corporate social responsibility — powering donations, volunteering programmes, and grants for some of the world's largest companies. It's a space with real weight. When you're building software that moves money to charities and mobilises people to volunteer, purpose is hard to ignore, and it kept me genuinely motivated across the whole run.
When I joined, there were roughly ten engineers in Barcelona. By the time I left, we were close to thirty-five, and I was managing, through Engineering Managers, a broader organisation of forty to fifty people across the function. Building those teams — hiring deliberately, watching people grow into senior engineers and tech leads, seeing squads go from forming to genuinely high-performing — was one of the most rewarding experiences of my career. Org design at that scale has its own intellectual richness: how you structure teams around domains, how you create the conditions for ownership, how you keep culture coherent as headcount multiplies.
I was enjoying the ride. I want to be clear about that, because what came next wasn't a crisis.
Chapter Two: The Pause
At some point — subtle, impossible to timestamp precisely — I started noticing a gap. Not dissatisfaction, more like a quiet awareness that something I cared about had slowly moved out of reach. The further I drifted from day-to-day technical work, absorbed in org strategy, headcount planning, and cross-functional alignment, the more I missed the craft.
It took a while to name it. When I did, the decision became obvious: step back, properly.
The sabbatical lasted five months. The brief I gave myself was simple — no Slack, no email, no Grafana dashboards, no "quick calls." Just summer with my family, without the weight of an engineering organisation on my shoulders. It was exactly what I needed. Space to think, space to not think, space to remember what I actually wanted from this work.
By autumn, I was ready to look.
Chapter Three: The Podcast, the CTO, and SeQura
What happened next I can only describe as a small planetary alignment.
I was listening to a podcast I follow regularly — MarsBasedPodcast, a Barcelona-focused tech show — and stumbled on an episode featuring Francesc Plà, CTO at SeQura. I didn't know SeQura. I didn't know Francesc. But something in that conversation — the way he talked about engineering culture, team shape, and the kind of technical leadership he valued — landed squarely in the gap I'd been trying to fill.
SeQura went on my radar. A few well-placed conversations with friends later, my profile reached Francesc's inbox. A clear, respectful, well-run hiring process followed — the kind that tells you something real about how a company operates — and a few weeks later I had an offer.
I'm now Tech Lead and Engineering Manager for the Finance Area at SeQura.
What "Back to Basics" Actually Means
SeQura is a FinTech. Two things immediately stood out.
The first is domain depth. Finance at the level a real FinTech operates — payment flows, credit products, regulatory constraints, reconciliation logic — is genuinely complex territory I hadn't had the chance to explore properly before. The learning curve has been steep and I've enjoyed every metre of it.
The second is the stack: Ruby on Rails. I hadn't written serious Rails code in years, coming from a world of Java and PHP. Coming back to it as a senior engineer is a different experience entirely. Rails rewards deep familiarity — its conventions carry enormous leverage once you trust them, and working within a codebase shaped by years of real production decisions is a different kind of education than greenfield work. There's also something quietly satisfying about opening pull requests again, getting review comments, shipping features as one more contributor on the team. Being an IC again, even part of the time, is not something I take for granted.
The teams I lead are ten engineers total. After years of managing through layers, the directness is refreshing. I know exactly what everyone is working on, can see problems forming before they become incidents, and can go technically deep in any conversation because I'm close enough to the work to have real context. At this scale, architectural decisions feel immediate — you can see the impact land in real time.
The Point
I'm not writing this to suggest scale is bad, or that the Benevity years were anything other than excellent — they were. What I'm saying is that senior engineering careers have more shapes than the org chart usually suggests. Moving from a fifty-person organisation to a ten-person team, from pure people leadership to a hybrid IC/EM role, from Java to Rails, from CSR to FinTech — none of that felt like stepping back.
It felt like stepping forward, towards something I'd been circling for a while.
If you're a senior engineer or engineering leader with a quiet feeling that something important has slipped out of reach: that feeling is probably worth listening to.