About Me

Who Am I?

Engineering leader with 11 years in software. I currently serve as Principal Engineering Leader, Technology Strategy at Critical TechWorks, BMW Group's software joint-venture partner, where I support 45 engineering units and shape how AI changes the way we build, test and qualify software. Before that I led the engineering of a business unit of 10+ squads and around 80 engineers, delivering autonomous-driving platform products for BMW.

My roots are hands-on: C++, Python and build systems in safety-critical automotive software, ISO 26262 quality pipelines, and roles from Senior Software Engineer to Engineering Unit Lead. What I care about: engineering excellence at scale, developer experience, and turning individual expertise into organizational capability.

How I Lead

I lead as a technical servant leader: I set direction without dictating implementation, grow engineers into technical leaders, and keep engineering, product and stakeholders connected. I aim for teams that are autonomous and technically excellent, and I step back as they get there.

Engineering Leadership

Technology Strategy & AI

Mentoring & Communities

Quality & Safety (ISO 26262)

What I bring

Leadership Focus

Engineering Leadership

Led the engineering of a business unit of 10+ squads (around 80 engineers): technical direction, delivery visibility, stakeholder management and mentoring across platform qualification, safety automation, integration testing, build and CI.

Technology Strategy & AI

Shaping an AI Operating Model for engineering: agentic workflows, AI observability and FinOps, while keeping testing, traceability and quality reporting first-class in AI-enabled development.

Teams & Culture

Co-founded a Rust Community of Practice and a company-wide C++ daily; built internal training on debugging, performance, quality and testing; ran unit-wide all-hands and cross-team alignment.

What do I work with?

Skills

Leadership first, grounded in deep technical experience.

Engineering Management & Delivery

Team leadership, delivery visibility and metrics, stakeholder management, roadmaps, hiring and mentoring

Agile & Product

Scrum Master (PSM I), Product Owner (PSPO I), requirements and prioritization, cross-unit alignment

Technology Strategy & AI Engineering

AI Operating Model, agentic workflows, AI observability, FinOps, engineering-excellence programs

Software Quality & Functional Safety

ISO 26262, static and dynamic analysis, custom Clang-Tidy checkers, sanitizers, code coverage, hermetic builds

Languages & Platforms

Modern C++, Python, Rust, Shell, SQL; Linux, embedded and automotive platforms

Build, CI/CD & Tooling

Bazel (hermetic toolchains), CMake, LLVM/Clang, Git, Jenkins, Ansible, Docker, GTest/GMock, Jira

Education

Education

Master's Degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, 2025-2026 (in progress).

Bachelor's Degree in Computing from Edinburgh Napier University.

  • Web Technologies
  • Databases
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Software Development
  • Software Engineering Methods

Bachelor's Degree in Medical Computing and Instrumentation Engineering from Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto.

  • Electronics
  • Web Technologies
  • Data Acquisition and Processing
  • Image Processing
  • Programming

Certifications

  • Professional Scrum Master I (PSM I), Scrum.org, March 2025
  • Professional Scrum Product Owner I (PSPO I), Scrum.org, April 2025

Languages

Portuguese, English, Spanish and French (fluent); Italian and Catalan (basic).

Experience

Work Experience

Principal Engineering Leader, Technology Strategy at Critical TechWorks (BMW Group) Mar 2026 - Present

Company-level technical enabler supporting 45 engineering units: shaping the AI Operating Model for engineering, ensuring that testing, traceability, quality reporting and static/dynamic analysis remain first-class in AI-enabled development. Defining the company's AI competence landscape (agentic workflows, AI observability, FinOps/token-cost) and delivering agentic-AI training across the DevOps department, corporate operations and delivery managers. Converting technical-leadership knowledge into organizational capability through onboarding and consolidated engineering practices.

Engineering Unit Technology Lead at Critical TechWorks (BMW Group) Jan 2024 - Mar 2026

Led the technical direction of a business unit of 10 to 12 squads (75 to 90 engineers) working on the BMW autonomous-driving platform: delivery visibility, mentoring and stakeholder management with BMW counterparts. Portfolio spanning platform qualification, quality and safety automation, Linux/platform work, integration testing, build & CI and software factory. Built internal trainings on C++ debugging, software quality, performance and testing; supported teams across units and organized unit-wide activities and all-hands.

Senior Software Engineer & Scrum Master at Critical TechWorks (BMW Group) 2020 - 2024

Worked on the BMW autonomous-driving platform and its ISO 26262 quality pipelines, as a technical reference for the build and quality toolchain. Extended LLVM Clang-Tidy with new custom checkers and maintained an internal LLVM fork. Worked extensively with the Bazel build system: hermetic toolchains, sanitizer integration (uncovering misconfigurations that concealed undefined behavior), compiler-warning strategy and code coverage. Led a CI environment migration. Co-founded the Rust Community of Practice and the company-wide C++ daily. Temporarily absorbed Product Owner and Scrum Master responsibilities (stakeholder requirements, prioritization and team alignment) while mentoring engineers. Worked extensively with Zuul, AWS and Azure cloud platforms. Tech: C++14/17, Python, Bazel, LLVM/Clang, Ansible, Docker.

Software Engineer at Natixis 2017 - 2020

Worked on financial software (Summit) in C++ and Python, with a delivery pipeline built on GTest, Jenkins, XL Deploy, Git, Bitbucket and Jira. Led the Craftsman Academy, a weekly engineering-craftsmanship program of talks and mob programming.

Software Engineer at Newton.ai 2015 - 2017

Development of software to extract and qualify text from documents, mainly using C++ and Python.

Get in Touch

Contact

jorge.pinto.sousa@protonmail.ch


+351 91 409 24 28

Github


Linkedin

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Curriculum Vitae

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