Paulo Pereira VP Engineering, Lingokids

Company

Lingokids is the #1 interactive App for pre-schoolers, used by 78M families globally. They are a pioneer in education through their Playlearning approach and have created an iconic brand for early childhood education and stressless parenting. Founded in 2015, Lingokids launched their first app in early 2016 and reached 1M users after a year. Lingokids believe that by learning through play, children will develop skills like creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, and communication, and some of the smartest minds in the world are on the Lingokids educational board – bringing expertise in literacy instruction, vocabulary development, child psychology, ESL instruction and educational technology as well as technology, engineering, and art. They raised their Series C in the summer of 2021 which brought their total amount of funding raised to $65M+ with investors including HV Capital, 500 Startups, All Iron Ventures and Reach Capital.

Search Background

As the technology team was continuing to grow at pace, the leadership team decided that it was the right time to bring in an experienced, strategic technology leader who had been part of fast-growth, venture-backed executive teams before. Reporting to the Founder and CEO, they would be a key part of the leadership team for Lingokids, not only leading the technology and engineering activity within the organisation, but also serving as a critical strategic voice as the business scales. The technology team is expected to double in the next couple of years meaning that the VP Engineering will need to ensure that there is an engaging engineering brand within the business to attract and retain top talent.

Requirements

The successful candidate would ideally have previously been the engineering leader of a high-growth, founder-led company and can balance being close enough to the details to support and empower the engineering leaders, whilst also being able to lead the technical strategy as the company continues to grow. The business required someone who could operate with the team at present size (hands-on tactics required) whilst bringing proven ability to scale the team and manage engineering managers with teams underneath them. The technology team is expected to double in the next couple of years meaning that the VP Engineering will need to ensure that there is an engaging engineering brand within the business to attract and retain top talent.

Result

Conducting a European-wide search, Erevena introduced Paulo Pereira, a seasoned engineering leader with a breadth of experience building and leading high-performing teams within start-ups and scale-ups.

He joined Onfido as employee #13 and the 6th engineer and went on to build out Onfido’s Lisbon office from scratch as Engineering Director and Site Lead. Later at Remote, he scaled the engineering function from 25 to 180 globally distributed engineers.