Christian Jennewein, BlaBlaCar

Growing the Tech team at ridesharing startup Blablacar

This is the story of Christian and Nicolas, two Tech Managers at BlaBlaTech, who shaped the engineering team of the highly successful ridesharing startup. The team has grown from one single French five-person team to a dozen distributed and fully agile teams with 30+ people in only two years. Their main responsibility? Building and scaling the development team by constantly improving engineering processes, integrating and training new talents, and anticipating tomorrow’s organization. Their challenges? Delivering the same level of quality software and services in an ever-growing business where customer feedback is instantaneous and shared all over the web.

Biography Pretty early, Christian was fascinated by "making the web", his first website went live in the mid-1990s on GeoCities. He studied computer science in Germany while working for web agencies on various projects. Via Australia he moved to France to join Criteo as a web developer as one of the very first employees. Afterwards, he joined the French Gmaps-competitor Mappy as a developer and then Symfony-editor SensioLabs as a technical project manager. In January 2013, he joined the BlaBlaCar adventure as the first manager in the then small engineering team. Ever since he has focused on building and scaling the development team by constantly adapting process and integrating new talent. The team grew from one single French five-person team to a dozen distributed and fully agile teams with 30+ people in only two years. Today's challenge is to build and scale a second engineer hub in Warsaw, allowing to scale faster and thus to respond to an ever-growing business.