Marco Cedaro

Engineering Director

An optimist with a plan b
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👋 that's me
Email: [email protected] Phone: +44 079 25 36 3708 Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/cedmax Github: https://github.com/cedmax

I'm a principle-driven, people-first manager who believes that outcomes are byproducts of investing in people and culture. Comfortable navigating (and helping others navigate) ambiguity, I enable aligned autonomy through strategic guardrails and operational support. I leverage my technical background to guide and challenge decisions, remaining hands-on when necessary.

Professional Experience

08/2025

Engineering Director

Smartsheet

privately held

Leading ~40 engineers across three fully remote, cross-functional platform teams delivering enterprise solutions and premium offerings, supporting $1B+ in annual revenue. Each team is at a different stage, and I collaborate closely with my EMs to provide tailored leadership to support decisions aligned with business and customer needs.

Admin Center focuses on building a unified sysadmin control panel to manage seats, usage, and policies. I’m guiding its strategic realignment from a feature factory to a platform to empower other teams to autonomously surface their content and settings, reducing operational bottlenecks.

The Audit team delivers account activity history for transparency and auditability. The current focus is on simplifying the event self-onboarding experience by defining event ownership, governance, and improving developer experience.

DataTable is executing a long-term plan to modernise premium data storage services, consolidating multiple overlapping legacy systems to achieve feature parity and improve maintainability.

04/2020 - 07/2025

Engineering Director

Storio Group (formerly Photobox Group)

privately held

I was initially hired to help build a new serverless platform for an ambitious CRM strategy, then promoted to lead the eCommerce area. Following the merger of Photobox Group and Netherlands-based Albelli, I focused on uniting 6 eCommerce teams (~55 people across UK, NL, ES, and UA) into a single domain while driving commercial goals and a major replatforming across stacks ranging from .NET and Node.js to AWS and a custom K8s platform, including a 20-year-old Perl monolith and modern event-driven microservices.

I partnered with senior leadership on domain technical strategy and budget, and led the discovery for the post-replatforming operating model, proposing a team reorganisation aligned with team topologies and the company’s strategic direction.

Achievements

  • Enabled 2 full system replatformings, moving ~50% of the customer base to the target platform while maintaining commercial and operational KPIs.
  • Successfully mentored Senior Engineers transitioning to Engineering Manager roles;
  • Steered teams through merger, re-orgs, redundancies, budget constraints, and distributed teams including colleagues in active war zones.

Marco is a rare engineer leader who combines an empathetic style with deep technical acumen to create value whilst striking a great balance between speed, quality and enabling humans in the loop to be the best they can be.

— David Jensen, CTO @ Storio Group

Previous Roles

07/2018 - 04/2020

Tech Lead

Condé Nast

privately held

Initially led the team replacing legacy CMSs to deliver a new experience for Vogue Runway’s editorial teams and customers worldwide. After a merger with our US sibling company, the focus shifted to cross-brand and syndication tooling while maintaining ownership of Fashion Shows services. Meanwhile, my role evolved from software and infrastructure architecture to line management, emphasising team culture, dynamics, and morale.

Between 2010 and 2016, I (co)founded and ran of one of the main European Front-End Conferences: From the Front. I took care of communication and customer care since day one, and worked each year on the lineup, call for papers and inclusivity policies.

I spoke at several conferences, including Paris Web in 2011, Front Trends in Warsaw in 2015 and 2017, DIBI London in 2016, React Advanced London in 2021. I gave keynotes to the Italian CssDay (2019) and JsDay (2024), and React Alicante, where I spoke in 2018 and 2019.

05/2017 - 06/2018

Front-end Lead

Crowdcube

privately held

First hire by the new CTO to drive a technical and cultural transformation, shifting the tech department from a “being told what to do” mindset to a problem-solving approach. I provided training, coaching, and production-ready proofs of concept to validate the transition to a modern stack, whilst leading a product team ad interim, and defined the hiring criteria and process for the role.

02/2016 - 04/2017

Senior Javascript Engineer

Kahoot!

privately held

The brief stint — due to organisational changes leading to the London office’s closure, in this mission-driven, UX and data-led company, shaped my engineering mindset. I contributed to key projects, championed performance improvements, mentored junior colleagues, and picked up React, Angular, and Backbone.js along the way. #startuplife

09/2012 - 02/2016

Senior Web Engineer

Shazam Entertainment

privately held

I was part of the web team building and maintaining the website, with a focus on a mobile-first companion experience to the app, emphasising semantic markup, modularity, and responsiveness. I led the modernisation of the front-end architecture.

08/2011 - 08/2012

Front-end Developer

Spreaker

privately held

The company was a fast-paced startup with high coding and testing standards. As the first external hire, I worked remotely with the 2 technical founders until the funding offered the opportunity to, taking full ownership of the front end.

07/2006 - 07/2011

Client-side Architect

Yoox Group (now YNAP)

public company

I joined as the second front-end developer and left as a client-side architect delivering internal SDKs to the experience teams (pioneering JavaScript unit testing before it was standard practice), after having led 2 teams, witnessing the company’s market flotation, and contributing to the engineering team’s growth from 20 to 130.

2004 - 07/2006

Webmaster

MagicNet

privately held

Started as an internship, I ended up handling full-stack development for all the agency projects as well as building internal tools to streamline SEO, content and time management, and a basic e-commerce platform.

06/2002 - 02/2006

Event Organiser

Kappa Management

privately held

I managed artist bookings, accommodations and made sure the events ranging from a few hundreds to several thousands attendees ran smoothly. I was also responsible for marketing material and website.

Education

In 2002, I was 3 years into a 5-year Communication Studies degree when I had the chance to turn my longtime webmaster hobby into a job. Stepping into the professional world, I realised my true passion lay in tech and soon left university to pursue a full-time career in the industry.

More About Me

Strength

  • I take pride in presenting myself at face value, and to be as transparent as my role allows me to be. This is essential for building trust and being a reliable partner for my manager, peers and (in)direct reports.
  • I have a very pragmatic approach when it comes to risk management and problem solving: this come very handy during crisis, but it’s quite helpful in complex problem solving, when having contingency plans is crucial.
  • Ambiguity doesn’t throw me off: I’m able to navigate uncertainty and keep my teams focused on outcomes.

Weaknesses

  • When presented with new information or plans, I tend to ask a lot of questions, sometimes seemingly unrelated. Those who know me appreciate this is my process and how I operate, but I prefer to give a heads-up early on to ensure it’s not misinterpreted as a lack of trust or focus.
  • I’m not a big fan of surprises — especially when it comes to discovering critical information in public settings. While I’m actively working on this, I still encourage my peers to keep me informed. I don’t mind being put on the spot, but having context in advance helps me contribute more effectively.
  • I do use a lot of emojis on slack 😅

Hobbies

I love going to music gigs (folk punk and DYI scene, mostly) — and I recently realised that I’m actually collecting band t-shirts with the “excuse” of supporting the scene — tension filled horror movies and casual board games (Sushi Go Party one of my favourites); I run to de-stress; and I code on my pet project, for instance:

Recommendations

He is highly respected for his integrity, direct communication style, and commitment to placing people and the organisation at the forefront of his efforts.

— Josh Marcus, VP of Engineering @ Storio Group

He was a fantastic partner to work with, as happy helping us think about how to present ideas as rolling up his sleeves and jumping into code. He was comfortable working through hard decisions and making some tough choices, but always kept the well being of the team front of mind.

— Matthew Davy, Product Manager @ Photobox

Marco inherited a team with low morale and in his own words leading “a group of people who happen to work together rather than a team”. He moved quickly to create a solid team structure and we’re all heading in the right direction because of the hard work and effort he put in.

— Lee Davis, Senior Software Engineer @ Condé Nast

We had a need to bring someone new into the team, who could take a lead across the web front-end code base, and lead a team across the stack. That person needed to be pragmatic and be able to judge what to adopt and how to shape the stack with a focus on simplification. Marco led the team in that direction, with a mix of practices for the whole team, and his own code.

— Rich Pearce, CTO @ CrowdCube

He was the driver of the whole team, being at the same time a terrific team leader, a meticulous architect and a great pair programming buddy. He easily instilled all his passion about the front-end world to me and the whole team.

— Rocco Curcio, Senior Javascript Engineer @ Yoox

Marco is a rare engineer leader who combines an empathetic style with deep technical acumen to create value whilst striking a great balance between speed, quality and enabling humans in the loop to be the best they can be.

— David Jensen, CTO @ Storio Group