Péter Szilágyi

Led the distributed 10-engineer team responsible for the presentation editor frontend, a flagship product that re-emerged as Prezi’s primary strategic focus after the pandemic pivot to video. Took over a team with cultural resistance to change and rebuilt cohesion, collaboration, and delivery efficiency.

Key achievements

• Stabilized and rebuilt a team in a forming phase with members across Hungary, Germany, Portugal, and Ireland; introduced weekly virtual fika and rituals to foster belonging in a remote-first culture.
• Introduced modernized stand-up and meeting practices, shifting from stakeholder-heavy, verbose discussions to a board-driven, focused process, which was initially resisted but later adopted as clearly more effective.
• Drove weekly showcase culture by leading by example: presented team outcomes to Product and C-level executives to increase visibility and pride in engineering work.
• Modernized an outdated release process for a monolithic frontend: documented processes, removed single points of failure, automated steps with scripts, and moved from bi-weekly to weekly releases.
• Championed modernization of local development tooling: partnered with the Developer Experience team to introduce Vite and improved build tooling, securing buy-in even from skeptical engineers.

Engineering Manager for Silk Road, part of Content Platform’s Catalog Foundations. Led 6–8 engineers in building metadata ingestion and catalog infrastructure powering music, podcasts, audiobooks, and video. Drove critical cross-functional programs with massive business impact.

Team leadership & people development

• Rebuilt the engineering squad after managerial churn: re-established 1:1s, development talks, team norms, and EM/PM collaboration model.
• Sponsored multiple IC promotions (E2, Senior), created structured growth frameworks, and coached new joiners to accelerate embedding and cross-team influence.
• Consistently praised for creating a safe, welcoming environment, ensuring quieter voices are heard, and fostering team cohesion.

Execution & cross-team leadership

• Delivery responsible for the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) project
  • Managed cross-team stakeholders under extremely challenging conditions
  • Delivered on time under immovable US regulatory deadlines
  • Successfully unlocked $150M in previously unattributable royalties and helped secure Spotify’s US licensing rights
• Led the Audiobook Delivery Working Group, creating a delivery “battle plan”, driving alignment across Content Platform, and steering stakeholder communication.
• Led the Podcast Metrics Working Group across engineering, Product, and Product Insights.
• Took over PM responsibilities during leave while maintaining full EM responsibilities. Praised for reliability, clarity, and cross-functional collaboration.

Engineering effectiveness

• Introduced a visual approach to quarterly planning, refined backlog, and improved squad accountability.
• Designed and rolled out an on-call rotation, collaborating with other EMs to adopt best practices and training junior engineers.

Started as a QA engineer, and grew into Engineering Manager for native development teams responsible for iOS, Android, macOS, Windows apps, and video SDKs powering enterprise streaming.

Key achievements

• Managed two mobile teams (iOS & Android, ~10 people total) after an EM left the company; self-directed learning and practice established my leadership foundation.
• Led a complex collaboration with Epic Games to build a synchronized in-game video player for 100 simultaneous users, requiring cross-platform engineering and adoption of C++ for mobile teams.
• Resolved team friction between engineers with 1:1 coaching and a facilitated cross-team alignment session, establishing shared ways of working.
• Built a high-performing, cross-functional project team with internal engineers and external consultants; delivered a first-of-its-kind synchronized playback experience.

Produced customer product documentation for Ericsson's telecom systems.