Engineering Manager ● 14 years in ● Remote, UK
I'm Vali Shah. For 14 years I've built and led teams through greenfield builds, platform evolution, and large-scale optimisations — at Smartsheet, Skyscanner, and FULL Creative. I'm most impactful at the intersection of people, product, and technology.
Not a values poster. These are the trade-offs I make on a normal Tuesday.
Autonomy with clear context beats process with tight control. The team owns the how; I make sure the why is unmissable.
The best engineering decisions happen shoulder-to-shoulder with product — strategy in, outcomes out.
An awkward five-minute conversation now beats a surprise performance review later. Every time.
Small batches, visible priorities, predictable momentum. Heroics are a smell, not a culture.
Mentorship isn't a side quest — thoughtful code reviews, real stretch work, careers that go somewhere specific.
A team's velocity is mostly the friction you remove, so I advocate hard for modern tooling and infrastructure.
Smartsheet
Leading cross-functional engineering teams, building scalable systems, and driving technical strategy. The real work: building a culture where trust, autonomy, and clarity do most of the managing for me.
→ microservices, strategic leadership, team buildingSmartsheet
Owned key features in Smartsheet's data integrations platform — improving user interactions and driving adoption. Mentored junior engineers through thoughtful code reviews and streamlined dev workflows, and made the case for the modern tooling that let us ship faster and more reliably.
→ the chapter where leadership stopped being a side questSkyscanner
Built key features for Skyscanner's homepage — a front door with 100 million monthly visitors. Performant, scalable solutions on a microservices architecture, where a slow page meant a measurable dent in the business.
→ scale changes what "done" meansFULL Creative
Seven years of greenfield builds and large-scale optimisations, always anchored to customer value. This is where I caught the leadership bug — helping engineers grow into thoughtful, impact-driven people turned out to be more addictive than the code.
→ where it all startedEngineering leadership, AI, the odd founder misadventure — on Substack and Medium.
Expectations, traction, and sustainable growth — why Product Hunt is a milestone, not the goal.
②SubstackOne missing config, seven hours of debugging, and an unexpected lesson from vibe-coding with Cursor.
③MediumThe fine line AI-powered information systems walk — and who's responsible when they wobble.
④MediumA critical look at the part of the AI curriculum everyone keeps skipping.
New opportunities, collaborations, or an argument about whether standups should exist. All welcome.
hello@valishah.com