Engineering lead · Mobile & platform teams · The Netherlands

I lead small teams that ship native apps to millions, every two weeks.

I'm Saurabh: engineering lead, dad, cyclist. For 16+ years I've built iOS apps for millions of users, and at Sportlink I lead the team behind Voetbal.nl and the apps of seven Dutch and Belgian sports unions. I like automation that makes releases boring, and I'm now exploring how AI changes the way software gets built. I'm looking for my next engineering leadership role.

Portrait of Saurabh Garg

1.7M+

active app users on Voetbal.nl, the official app for Dutch amateur football (Voetbalmedia, Jan 2025)

1M+

daily users on Week Calendar, a top-3 grossing app in the Netherlands in its day

16 apps

shipped every two weeks by a team of seven, for seven Dutch and Belgian sports unions

20 years

in software, from native iOS to backend, and now AI

How I lead

I'm a hands-on leader. I like clear goals, a steady release rhythm and a team that enjoys the craft.

Reliable delivery, automated

I've set up CI/CD pipelines from scratch with open-source tooling for fast beta feedback. At Marktplaats I built a Jenkins pipeline that delivered daily internal betas, with change-logs generated from Git commit messages, and led the move to test-driven development, taking new and refactored modules from zero to almost 100% code coverage. At Sportlink that mindset ships 16 app flavors every two weeks through an automated pipeline, with per-flavor feature toggles for gradual rollouts. The goal is simple: releases should be routine, not events.

AI and software factories

Much of Sportlink's backend is written in Navajo, a service framework from Dexels with little debugging support. So I built Claude skills and agents that teach AI to work in it, then had Claude set up a local test harness: every change is checked by comparing API responses before and after, or against expected output for new endpoints. It covers far more combinations of input than manual testing ever did. A sizeable part of our backend work, including the API changes for the apps' redesign, went through it, and delivery got faster. That is the idea behind software factories: automated, agent-assisted pipelines that take a change from idea to verified release, with people setting the direction and reviewing the result. I'm also exploring self-hosted LLM inference.

Small team, big output

At Sportlink my team was seven people: a product owner, three developers across app and backend, a QA engineer, a technical analyst and me. Small, senior and automated is how that team ships 16 apps every two weeks.

De-risking big changes

I led the migration of legacy authentication to OAuth2 across the apps. Per-flavor, per-platform feature toggles allowed a gradual rollout, and test guides let each union prepare its own organisation before go-live.

Hands-on depth

I've worked from mobile to backend for 20 years, and I built the full Swift and Vapor backend for my own app, Instint. That lets me have real technical conversations with every part of a team.

People and partnership

I like joining early: I was the second iOS engineer at Booking.com and helped recruit the people around me. I mentor engineers, lead distributed teams, and work with clients, product owners and the service desk to keep support SLAs healthy and changes smooth.

Selected work

Teams and products I've led or helped build.

Earlier career

  • 2012–2014
    Marktplaats (eBay)

    Took the lead on a universal iPad app for Marktplaats, the Netherlands' largest classifieds marketplace, and built the test automation and fast internal beta tooling around it.

  • 2011–2012
    Booking.com

    Second full-time iOS engineer on the mobile team. Built time-zone support for 24-hour check-ins in the same-day booking app.

  • 2010–2011
    eBuddy

    Real-time chat apps for the iPhone, plus test-driven Java and Spring work on the eBuddy web client.

  • 2009–2010
    Aol Autos

    AOL Autos for iPhone, one of the first apps for researching new cars on the App Store.

What I'm looking for

A leadership role where native mobile is central to the product.

  • Engineering Manager, mobile or product
  • Head or Director of Mobile
  • CTO or founding engineer at a product company
  • Remote preferred, hybrid works well. Based in Overijssel, in the Netherlands.
  • Teams that value automation, quality and a thoughtful use of AI.
  • One app or twenty, as long as quality and users come first.
  • Open and flexible on the details. If it sounds interesting, let's talk.

A bit about me

I'm a dad, a cyclist and an engineer. I hold master's degrees in Computer Engineering and Computer Science from North Carolina State University, and was once a doctoral student in Biomedical Engineering at UNC Chapel Hill. I work in English, and my Dutch is at working level and improving.

On the side I'm co-founding Instint, a family productivity app built entirely in Swift: SwiftUI on the device and Vapor on the server. It keeps me close to the work and to what my own team goes through.

Read my blog, Everything That Is Yet To Come →

Let's talk

If you're hiring a mobile leader, I'd love to hear about it.