About
I'm Daniel Parker, a principal software engineer currently leading the engineering team at Vendia. I've been building software professionally since 2011, working across consulting, startups, and enterprise, with nearly 10 years specializing in AWS serverless architectures.
Background
My career started in software consulting in Australia, working with companies of all sizes across different industries. That early exposure taught me to adapt quickly and work across domains, a pattern that's defined my career ever since.
I joined A Cloud Guru as their first engineering hire, riding the wave of rapid growth while becoming deeply specialized in AWS serverless technologies. From there, I worked across several startups before landing at GitLab, where I shifted focus to enterprise integration architecture, helping prepare the company for IPO by solving complex technical and organizational challenges at scale.
At Vendia, I've led the engineering team through multiple significant product pivots: from blockchain-based auditable data platforms, to big data sharing solutions leveraging Apache Iceberg, and most recently to AI products and tooling for customers. I work across our entire stack: client interfaces, SaaS applications, SDKs, APIs, and core infrastructure.
Philosophy
I'm a generalist by nature and by design. I've always operated across technical domains, business contexts, and company scales. Being flexible and continuously learning is how I stay relevant and how I compete, both in the market and within my teams.
My approach to technical leadership centers on transparency and distributed ownership. The goal isn't for me to know everything and design all solutions. That makes me a bottleneck and kills team buy-in. Instead, I work to bring people along, share context openly, and delegate decision-making to avoid becoming a single point of failure. I start from a position of high trust and only step in when something's going sideways. I'm not punitive, but I do expect personal responsibility and for people to lean in where they can.
Finding MVP solutions to ambitious visions while keeping the team aligned is one of the hardest parts of the job, especially when maintaining system quality across multiple owners and frequent pivots. That tension between speed, quality, and distributed ownership is something I think about constantly.
On Serverless
After nearly a decade working with serverless, my perspective has evolved. It has its place, but it introduces complexity for development teams that's often underestimated. I still build with it, but with much more nuance about the tradeoffs.
Why This Blog
At this point in my career, I'm forming more concrete opinions about technical and product leadership. I'm writing to document those ideas—for other engineers, for potential clients, and for myself. I'm particularly interested in the meta-level dynamics: team patterns, hidden decision-making contexts, second-order consequences. I'm reflective by nature, and this blog is where I work through those reflections.
Location
I'm originally from Australia, have lived in Ecuador, and now live in Barcelona, Spain. That international perspective shapes how I think about remote work and the global software engineering market.