Alessandro B.
Director of Engineering | ex-Founder in Residence @ Google
Studied at Università degli Studi di Milano
Worked at Google
Hiring Manager
Available Wednesday at 2:30 PM UTC
Questions? Start chatting with this coach before you get started.
Alessandro’s Leadership Development Qualifications
Experience level: Director
60+ people coached for Leadership Development
Are you ready to take your engineering leadership to the next level? As a Google engineering leader who helped shape sustainable travel features used by millions, I'm passionate about developing technical leaders who create meaningful impact. Who I Work With: * Engineering managers leading rapidly scaling teams * Senior ICs transitioning to leadership roles * Technical leaders seeking to amplify their impact * Professionals at the intersection of engineering, product, and business Why Work With Me: * Led multiple zero-to-one initiatives at Google, building new product offerings and capabilities while building and growing engineering teams * Former Founder in Residence at Area 120 (Google's internal incubator) * 50+ successful coaching engagements with engineering leaders * Deep experience building and scaling high-performing teams Areas of Focus: * Navigating technical and organizational complexity * Building and scaling high-performing engineering teams * Developing executive presence and communication skills * Balancing technical excellence with business impact * Cross-functional leadership across Engineering, Product, and Partnerships My coaching style is hands-on and collaborative. We'll work together to define clear goals, identify growth opportunities, and create actionable development plans tailored to your unique challenges. Past mentees have successfully transitioned to leadership roles, scaled their teams effectively, and increased their organizational impact. Ready to begin your leadership journey? Let's start with a free intro call to discuss your goals and explore how we can work together. Available in English and Italian.
Alessandro can help with:
Conflict Resolution
Change Management
Ethical Leadership
Diversity and Inclusion
Problem Solving
Emotional Intelligence
Coaching and Mentoring
Time Management
Innovation and Creativity
Alessandro also coaches for Career Development and Software Engineering. View all.
Why do I coach?
Thinking back about my own experience, my growth considerably accelerated every time I had access to strong coaches and mentors. Unfortunately, I did not have access to that until a few years into my professional career, and I wish I had sought that out earlier. I coach because I want to help others find their footing sooner and grow stronger.
Work Experience
Director of Engineering
Quilt
November 2024 - Present
Senior Engineering Manager
April 2021 - October 2024
Hiring Manager
Led multiple product development teams to drive sustainable travel innovation through consumer-facing products and industry partnerships. • Managed multiple managers overseeing high-impact projects that shaped Google's sustainability efforts in the travel industry. • Built and launched emission labels in Google Flights by hiring and onboarding a new team, coordinating cross-functional partners, and going from concept to launch in four months, reaching hundreds of millions of users. • Developed and publicly released the Travel Impact Model (TIM), now the leading emissions model adopted by Skyscanner, Expedia, Booking, Amadeus, Travelport and many others. Worked closely with an Advisory Committee of experts from academia, NGOs, industry, and policymakers to keep TIM aligned with cutting-edge science. • Partnered with Google Research on Contrail Avoidance, supporting field trials and industry engagement to advance contrail reduction practices. • Scaled new Google Search features to improve discoverability for trains and buses, enhancing the user experience for millions of queries by providing sustainable travel alternatives. • Defined and championed the long-term product vision and strategy, directing our attention was focused on high-impact opportunities to advance sustainable travel. • Coached both new and experienced managers and technical leads to foster a high-performing team culture. Sustainability, Climate and +3 skills
founder in residence
2020 - March 2021
Exploring opportunities that could become a new business for Google.
Staff Software Engineer
June 2016 - July 2020
Built a new vertical shopping experience for Flight + Hotel Packages shopping on google.com, launched in 3 countries featuring 40+ travel brands. • Co-founded the project and developed initial pitch. Collaborated with UX, PM, Business Development and Legal to prove business viability. Built and launched an MVP in less than 6 months. • Recruited and developed a diverse and high-performing full-stack team of 15+ engineers. Grew two leads into managers leading their own teams. • Worked with several third parties (Tour Operators, Airlines, Travel Agents) to pitch the product, agree on integration options and requirements and launch their brands on Google. The product featured 40+ travel brands at peak. • Authored many critical components of the project stack. Set technical direction via consistent design and code review feedback. Developed a dedicated Java backend (400 QPS at peak) and frontend, alongside several other dedicated binaries and data pipelines to support content retrieval and indexing. • Established a strong analytical and data-driven foundation by developing data pipelines and dashboards to track core metrics across frontend and backend. Kept the team focused on gathering experimental data to drive progress. Technical Leadership, Engineering Management and +1 skill
Education
Università degli Studi di Milano
Master’s Degree, Computer Science
2005 - 2007
Grade: 110 cum laude (honors) Master thesis: "Cellular Automata rule evolution through a Neuro-Genetic approach", dealing with Cellular Automata, Evolutionary Algorithms and Machine Learning.
Università degli Studi di Milano
Bachelor’s Degree, Computer Science
2002 - 2005
Grade: 110 cum laude (honors) Final report title: "Valutazione del parser Chaos rispetto al Turin University Treebank" ("Evaluation of the Chaos parser with respect to the Turin University Treebank"). The objective of the study was the development of a dependency based algorithm to translate the annotation format used in the TUT, and then use the resulting data to evaluate the performance of the Chaos parser for Natural Language.