Dragan Stepanović

Senior Principal Engineer @Delivery Hero SE

Berlin, DE

Hired as the most senior engineer in a 400+ Product and Tech organization (talabat) and one of the two most senior engineers in the whole Delivery Hero group (4k+ engineers)- Led 15 Staff engineers as part of the Architecture Council. The purpose of the group was to reduce the growing entropy of solutions across talabat\'s engineering organization by establishing common architectural direction and principles that teams can follow. The group proactively identified and addressed systemic issues like accidental coupling, unclear service boundaries, and duplicated logic — problems that RFCs alone can\'t solve. It also served as “one voice” among the Staff+ engineers to identify and raise sociotechnical issues like misaligned incentives or conflation of architectural/team boundaries- Co-created Delivery Hero\'s org-wide architecture review process with 2 other principal engineers. Acted as a bar raiser on 10+ tribe architecture reviews- Led the evolution of engineering culture towards Extreme Programming (XP) and Lean software development- redesigned the hiring process and pipeline to match the culture we wanted to have - coached the coaches (3 staff engineers and multiple senior engineers) to scale the culture and coaching capacity - oversaw implementation of 3-day XP onboarding workshop for all new joiners and existing engineers - coached a dozen of teams on XP practices (TDD, Refactoring, Continuous Integration practices), Pair/Mob Programming, product-minded engineering, Lean software development - ran workshops on testability and design for 10+ teams. The goal was to teach software design skills that allows for tests that are faster, more deterministic and easier to maintain with the goal of having stronger safety net and reducing rework - organized tech talks with external invites, Lean Coffee, and Community of Practice - Systems Thinking workshops for managers and staff engineers