Engineering Manager @ Adyen
John Patterson
Product-minded engineering leader. I build teams — and the leaders inside them — that turn ambiguous problems into shipped business outcomes, in close partnership with Product and Design.
Product partnership
I lead engineering as a product discipline. Product and Design are co-authors of strategy on my teams — and it shows in the outcomes we choose and the ones we hit.
Growing leaders
I scale by developing ownership in others: coaching senior engineers into leads, onboarding new leaders, and building teams that run well when I'm not in the room.
Cross-org execution
I ship hard initiatives across a federated org, building coalitions and influence where I don't hold authority — and holding the line on outcomes.
Featured work · Adyen
Consolidating two customer portals into one
Some of Adyen's customers had to run their business across two separate portals. The split meant duplicate configuration, missing features like SSO and support ticketing, and an innovation tax where every feature had to be built twice. I led the cross-organizational initiative to retire the secondary portal and consolidate every customer workflow into one.
Framed it as strategy, not cleanup
Instead of pitching a technical migration, I built the business case around three customer impacts: duplicate configuration hurting satisfaction, critical features missing for some users, and dual implementation causing incidents. That framing aligned product, operations, commercial, and support around one shared urgency.
Made Product a co-owner
Rather than treat this as an engineering job, I made Product a co-owner of the approach. Together we bet on user-controlled migration over a faster bulk cutover — reversible, so we could launch, listen, and iterate instead of making a trapdoor decision. Self-migrating users arrived with intent, raising adoption quality while keeping support burden low.
Scaled through enablement
When a partner team's roadmap was consuming my team's bandwidth, I didn't just say no — I helped make the case for growing their own engineering capacity, then used my team to onboard them. They now ship meaningfully faster. You scale by helping teams build capability, not by absorbing their work.
Built influence without authority
The consolidated portal lacked the frontend error monitoring the old one had. Rather than escalate, I built a coalition across engineering and the original maintainers — which led to a lasting investment in production monitoring for every frontend team, not just my migration.
Where dependencies couldn't be prioritized away, I ran a repeatable playbook: co-design in-house when there's capacity and urgency, flex scope when a piece can slip without compromising the goal, and embed my engineers as accelerants when knowledge is the bottleneck. Consolidating onto the mature portal affirmed a single-platform vision, removed the duplication tax, and raised reliability — with minimal disruption to customers or support.
Experience
Engineering Manager · Adyen
- Built and lead two multidisciplinary teams — 12+ engineers, PMs, and a designer — owning Adyen's merchant-facing Customer Area products.
- Coached a Senior Engineer to own a data-service migration to Elasticsearch and Kafka end to end, taking critical SLO slips from 12+ to zero.
- Took ownership of the critical payments pages and drove +70% on their product-goal KPIs.
- Rallied a cross-functional task force to ship platform-wide privacy controls under a one-week compliance deadline, aligning stakeholders across Legal, Commercial, Security, and Comms behind one execution plan.
- Led the end-to-end consolidation of two customer portals into one — the initiative detailed in the case study above.
Senior Software Engineer · Adyen
- Shaped a new KYC performance-insights tool, interviewing pilot customers and folding their feedback directly into the product.
- Backend Java/Spring engineer on a customer-management portal serving platform, marketplace, and banking customers.
Senior Software Engineer / Project Lead · Stripe
- Designed a 2-year release roadmap that united three engineering teams, product, and data science behind a shared plan.
- Led Stripe's Brazilian Anticipations offering end to end — product scoping, service architecture, and hands-on delivery — across Legal, Product, Accounting, and 10+ teams.
- Drove a team quality effort that took the weekly bug backlog from ~80 to under 10.
Senior Software Engineer / Squad Lead · Microsoft
- Led a squad of 5 engineers building a compiler for Office test-spec validation, setting technical direction and architecture while staying hands-on in the code.
- Reworked system caching to triple capacity, saving $3m+ and eliminating the most common class of errors.
Software Engineer · Qualtrics
Converted an organization of 30+ engineers to TypeScript, and wrote about the process on the Qualtrics engineering blog.
Software Engineer · Earlier roles
Engineering roles at Acadian Ambulance, Golfballs.com, and UL Lafayette — where I first taught teams new languages and shipped products end to end.
Leadership
Technical foundation
Education
B.S. Computer Science · B.S. MathematicsUniversity of Louisiana at Lafayette
Writing
Starting to write things down
A place to put what I've learned about building software and building the teams that build it.
About
Hey! I'm John — an engineering manager living in Amsterdam and working at Adyen. I made the move from Seattle to the Netherlands a while back, and these days I spend most of my time helping a team of engineers, PMs, and designers ship merchant-facing payments products.
I started out as a backend developer and still enjoy the craft — but what energizes me most now is growing people and teams, untangling cross-functional problems, and making delivery feel calm and predictable.
Outside of work, exercise fuels me — I help organize a run club and log a lot of kilometers. I'm a lifelong reader and writer, and I like studying languages: English is my native tongue, I know some Spanish and German, and I'm working on my Dutch.
Als u Nederlands met mij spreken wilt, dan stuurt u mij een bericht!