About Dervis
Hello, I’m Sam Dervis, an Engineering Manager and software engineering leader based in Germany.
I’ve spent my career building software, leading engineers, and working through the problems that sit somewhere between technology, people, and delivery.
Things like:
- How technical should an Engineering Manager actually be?
- When should a manager challenge a technical decision?
- How do you manage a strong engineer whose behaviour is hurting the team?
- Who owns architecture decisions when you have an Engineering Manager, Tech Lead, Staff Engineer and Product Manager in the same room?
- What does good incident management look like when production is already failing and everyone suddenly has a theory?
The interesting part of engineering leadership tends to start where the neat answers stop working.
My background spans backend and full-stack engineering, distributed systems, platform and reliability work, and engineering management. I’ve worked with teams across Europe, Africa, and distributed environments, including leading engineering teams at Babbel and previously working in large-scale technology organisations such as Safaricom.
Over time, I’ve become particularly interested in the trade-offs behind engineering leadership.
How do you give teams autonomy without disappearing as a manager?
How do you stay technically credible without becoming the most expensive reviewer on every pull request?
How do you improve delivery without turning the team into a Jira reporting department?
And now, increasingly: what changes when AI can write code, review code, generate tests, inspect incidents and confidently suggest something that is completely wrong?
Those are the kinds of questions I write about here.
What I write about
Most of my writing sits around a few connected areas:
- Engineering management and leadership
- Technical leadership and architecture decisions
- Engineering effectiveness and delivery
- Reliability, incidents and operational ownership
- AI in engineering organisations
- Distributed and cross-cultural engineering teams
I’m less interested in universal rules.
Engineering teams are messy enough without pretending one framework works everywhere.
Context matters: the maturity of the team, the system being built, the people involved, the risks, the organisation around them, and sometimes whatever happened in production last Tuesday.
So I prefer practical situations, concrete examples, trade-offs and frameworks that can survive contact with an actual engineering team.
Engineering Leadership Notes
I publish Engineering Leadership Notes, a roughly twice-monthly collection of practical ideas on engineering management, technical leadership, team effectiveness and building better software organisations.
Some ideas start as short observations.
Others become longer articles here on samdervis.com once I realise the LinkedIn post probably needed more than six paragraphs.
Mentoring, workshops and speaking
Alongside my work as an engineering leader, I occasionally work with engineers, managers and organisations through mentoring, workshops, advisory conversations and speaking.
The topics usually come from the same problems I write about: developing Engineering Managers, improving technical decision-making, engineering effectiveness, reliability, incident management and helping engineering organisations think through the impact of AI.
I see this as an extension of my work in engineering leadership, not a separate career from it.
If you’d like to discuss an engineering leadership problem, invite me to speak, or explore working together, you can get in touch through the contact page.