Summary
Daniel Lafeir is a Senior Engineering Manager in Chicago with 11 years of experience leading cross-functional teams to deliver resilient order and delivery infrastructure at enterprise scale. He blends hands-on technical depth—from Kotlin, Kafka, and Kubernetes to mobile backends and Solr—with a deliberate focus on systems thinking, stakeholder alignment, and clear executive communication. A former Thoughtworks lead consultant and Staff Engineer, he has a track record of transforming legacy systems, building developer platforms (Backstage, IaC), and untangling thorny production incidents. He pairs people leadership with a legal perspective—holding an MLS in Law & Technology—to proactively reduce legal and compliance risk in software initiatives. Known for codifying management practices for manager-of-managers and for finding the "aha" that accelerates teams, he also moonlights as a board-game playing "dragon slayer" builder on GitHub.
11 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS Financial Mathematics Economics Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BS Financial Mathematics Economics Computer Science at University of Michigan
Master of Legal Studies Law & Technology, Master of Legal Studies Law & Technology at University of California, Los Angeles - School of Law