---
aliases: ["Elena Konstantinou"]
Is A: Person
Tier: "3rd 🥉"
Tags: ["Podcast Guest"]
---
# Elena Konstantinou

VP of Engineering at a European fintech unicorn headquartered in Athens with offices across Europe. Elena joined the podcast to discuss the challenges of scaling an engineering organization from 20 to 200 engineers, covering hiring pipelines, team topology, technical debt management, and maintaining culture through hypergrowth. She has a background in distributed systems and previously held senior engineering roles at Amazon and Spotify.

## Notes

- Extremely structured in her thinking; provided clear mental models for each stage of engineering org growth
- Honest about mistakes made during rapid scaling, which made the conversation feel authentic
- Strong advocate for staff-plus engineering tracks as an alternative to management
- The episode performed well with engineering managers in the audience; several reached out to Luca saying it was exactly what they needed

## Collaborations

- [[24q3-podcast-season-2]] — recorded episode on scaling engineering organizations
- [[topic-team-leadership]] — discussed org design and engineering leadership at scale
- [[procedure-podcast-guest-outreach]] — introduced through European fintech CTO network
