Bjorn Heesakkers

I own the engineering strategy, technical vision, and operating model, ensuring alignment with company and product strategy. I lead and scale the engineering organization, define outcomes across delivery, reliability, and developer productivity, and act as final decision-maker on architecture, build-vs-buy, and major technical investments. I partner closely with the CEO, VP Product, and executive leadership on priorities, execution, and trade-offs. My role combines organizational leadership, cross-functional alignment, and accountability for system health, security, cost efficiency, and long-term scalability, while building a strong engineering culture and growing senior technical and leadership talent.

As Engineering Manager at Sendcloud I managed and developed the Experience domain. This domain exists out of 3 teams: Tracking, Checkout and Returns. These team are multidisciplinary teams consisting of frontend and backend developers, QA and UX. The Experience domain ensures that end-consumers have an amazing experience following their shipment, starting at the Checkout of the product, ending at delivery, while also providing a solid return process.

Handoff is a design tool that allows you to design like you would in any vector-based drawing tool, but export to clean, production-ready code. We've started this project because we felt that there is a problem in the way designers currently hand off their designs to developers. Current design tools export just static images. This is problematic, because images make it very hard for designers to properly communicate things like state, interactions and responsiveness. Hence: The Handoff Project.

I started at Sendcloud when the company was just small; there were about 15 employees. Over the years I have implemented and maintained the majority of the Sendcloud carriers, helped the platform scale, trained new engineers and developed API's and new features. Nowadays I play an important role in architecting, building and scaling the Sendcloud platform. Sendcloud has grown to 300 employees who together facilitate processing millions of parcels each month.

Mediaklapper was a startup which enabled agencies to buy offline media (billboards, paper ads and so on) online. I was responsible for software development and the user experience of Mediaklapper.nl. Mediaklapper was built with Ruby on Rails, stack ran on Debian, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Nagios and Nginx.

My work at ViaViela was twofold: 1. Product ownership: Representing the stakeholders and being accountable for ensuring that the team delivers value to the business. 2. Implementation of (part of those) features using Ruby on Rails and Python/Django.

Delivered a project on project standardization. Later on advised the organization on entrepreneurship, marketing and IT.

Worked on the software development of an administrative portal that automated financial streams, hour registration and more. Software was built on bare PHP. This was a typical LAMP stack. Later on conversion to a Ruby on Rails environment started.

Completed a project regarding backup solutions for desktop machines. Worked on a project for central knowledge sharing for all UniPartners offices.

Sold and repaired computers.