Engineering Leader

Sasa Fajkovic

Senior engineering leader building AI-powered products and high-performing engineering organisations.

About me

Welcome to my personal page. You can find out more about me, my professional journey, education and skills, or read some of my publications.

Feel free to reach out over email if you have any questions or would like to discuss a potential collaboration.

If you need a copy of my CV, you can download it by clicking the button below.

PDF CV

My blog articles

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Perspectives on engineering leadership, AI, and building high-impact products.

A skill is not a markdown file

Everyone is writing agent skills right now, and most of them quietly make the agent worse. What that actually costs you, why "be thorough" is the wrong instinct, and the checks that have been gating every skill across an engineering organisation for months.

No AI project. Just a new hire.

I'm speaking at WeAreDevelopers World Congress in Berlin on July 8th — 15,000 attendees, 500+ speakers. The topic is hiring virtual employees. Not AI strategy, not agentic frameworks. Hiring. Here's what twenty teams taught me.

I'm not building an AI Agent. I'm hiring a virtual employee.

Everyone's talking about AI agents. I keep coming back to a different question — in a remote-first world, what actually separates a human colleague from an AI one?

2025: The year AI learned to work (and I still didn't write enough blog posts)

A reflection on how AI agents transformed software development in 2025, my goals for building AMOS in 2026, and why powerful tools still require human discipline.

Professional journey

Applied AI Lead
Trade Republic, Berlin, DE
2022 - Present

Defining how the organisation adopts and operationalises AI — across engineering, product, and business:

Building and leading the Applied AI team — hiring, growing, and setting technical direction
Shaping the AI operating model: how teams discover, evaluate, and ship AI-powered capabilities responsibly
Driving LLM and AI integration across Trade Republic's product surface
Establishing AI governance, evaluation frameworks, and responsible use practices
Cross-functional leadership across product, engineering, operations, and business stakeholders

Engineering manager & Senior engineer
Deutsche Kreditbank AG, Berlin, DE
2020 - 2022

Led a cross-functional engineering team (backend, frontend, QA) to deliver:

New customer onboarding flows
Provisioning of 5+ mil. customers to a new debit card
Replacing legacy system with modern http REST APIs

Tech stack:

Kotlin, Spring Boot
Kubernetes, Docker
Prometheus, Grafana, Kibana
GitLab CI
PostgreSQL

Founder
Digitalni val, Zagreb, HR
2018 - 2020

Small agency offering B2B and B2C digital solutions

Proprietary system for real-time event-driven betting
Small to medium eCommerce & website development
Proprietary B2C CRM tooling
Retail office management

Tech stack:

Kotlin, Spring Boot
NodeJS, Puppeteer
Ubuntu server & Windows server
PostgreSQL

Lecturer
Algebra, Zagreb, HR
2016 - 2018

Lecture/Teacher with ECDL expertise, educating over 300 individuals

Introduction to web development - PHP, HTML, CSS, MySQL
Java programming (for backend and Android)
Microsoft Excel - ECDL Expert, Intermediate & Beginner
Microsoft Access - ECDL Expert, Intermediate & Beginner

Team lead
UniCredit group, Zagreb, HR
2016 - 2018

Led a full-stack engineering team delivering core retail banking products.

CRM tool built from scratch ensuring smooth and compliant B2C relationship
Do Not Call registry integration ensuring compliance and automated data processing
PSD2 regulation - backend implementation ensuring compliance and on-time delivery

Tech stack:

Java, Spring Boot
HTML, CSS, JS, AngularJS
Jenkins, GitLab
IBM CICS, IBM DB2

Project Manager & IT administrator
Carpe Diem, Karlovac, HR
2014 - 2016

Leading and coordinating project deliveries, ensuring on-time and within budget delivery of activities. Digitalized business flows with redundancy improving efficiency while lowering costs.