Rafael Santander

“I had the pleasure of working with Rafael for a few years across several teams and projects. Rafael is a master orchestrator. He runs a scrum team like Vivaldi runs a symphony. We worked on a few complex initiatives requiring cross org executive buy in, and a diverse set of engineers collaborating across groups with different priorities. Rafael ran a tight ship. He kept everything running smoothly and the trains ran on on time. It was very enjoyable to work with him tackling hard engineering problems and pursuing stakeholder buy in. Rafael was a trusted partner, an invaluable leader, and a great guy to work with. I highly recommend Rafael to any organization.”

“I had the privilege working with Rafael for 2+ years. He managed to grows our team from a 2 person incubation project to 12+ ppl. Rafael is a rarely bread of engineering leader that are both technical savvy and great at people management. He is a great manager that sees the potential in others, inspires people to achieve above and beyond their own expectations.”

“I’ve been associated with Rafael for little over a year at Salesforce. He’s been a great mentor and a colleague and has always had a patient ear to listen to my thoughts and ideas. Rafael is an effective leader, a great example for other managers in the organization, he strives to improve the daily engineering processes and runs his teams efficiently.”

“I had the pleasure of working with Rafael at Salesforce when I was PM for the Sales Cloud Inbox team at Salesforce. Rafael is an exceptional engineering manager who consistently goes above and beyond to ensure that his teams are successful, and partners incredibly well and effectively with product. He brings an immense expertise to his work, but also shows up as an authentic, graceful leader regardless of any challenge. Rafael consistently provides valuable insights and guidance to his teams; leaning in on his fantastic communication and coaching skills. His ability to lead and motivate is not only contained to his direct teams -- it is wickedly infectious and reaches all around him. Some of my most exciting and energizing moments as a PM came as a direct result of our partnership. Any organization would be incredibly lucky to have him!”

“I worked frequently with Rafael and his teams over the last several years. I’ve always been extremely impressed by the way that he champions the people on his teams and creates a fun and highly-productive work environment for those around him. He effectively turned large projects with a lot of unknowns into well-defined plans and successful outcomes. His teams were constantly focused on delivering customer value and and dedicated to producing high quality products.”

“I have worked closely with Rafael the past 1.5 years to deliver features for Salesforce Analytics products . Rafael is an inspiring and highly capable leader with the ability to establish clear strategy that motivates others to deliver. I have seen him lead his teams through several challenging situations with grace and humility while staying focused on solving customer problems and innovating . Rafael's ability to drive teams at a fast pace with a focus on quality, values, vision and relationships is exemplary . His team delivered multiple high quality features with high customer adoption. Rafael cares deeply about people and is sought after as a mentor not only by engineers in his team but also by people from other functions. He is a champion for his team and gave his team members various opportunities to grow and learn.”

“It has been an absolute pleasure working under the leadership of Rafael for the last three years. As my direct manager at Salesforce, Rafael has been an exceptional leader and mentor. His knowledge, experience, and expertise in the field have been invaluable in helping me grow both personally and professionally. One of Rafael's most impressive qualities is his ability to lead and manage a team effectively. He has a deep understanding of Scrum methodology and is able to apply it seamlessly to our software development process. He is an expert in facilitating sprint planning, daily stand-up meetings, sprint reviews, and retrospectives, which helped our team stay on track and deliver high-quality software products. Rafael's communication skills are second to none. He is able to clearly and effectively communicate with both technical and non-technical team members and clients. He is also a great listener and is always open to feedback, which helped to foster a positive and productive work environment. Rafael is always looking for ways to improve our team's processes and is constantly seeking out new technologies and methodologies to enhance our capabilities. In short, Rafael is an exceptional manager and I wholeheartedly recommend him for any software development leadership role. He has my highest endorsement, and I am confident that he will make a valuable contribution to any organization.”

“I had the pleasure of working with Rafael for three years at Salesforce and can confidently say that he is an exceptional engineering leader. I was impressed by his ability to set a clear vision for our team, mentor and guide individual team members, and ensure the success of everyone on the team. He also has a deep understanding of the engineering process and is able to clearly communicate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. In addition to his technical expertise, Rafael is also highly skilled in project management and organization. He is able to keep multiple projects on track and ensure that everyone is working towards the same goals. His collaboration skills and positive attitude encourages teamwork and open communication. Overall, I highly recommend Rafael for any engineering leadership role. He has the technical expertise, leadership skills, and vision necessary to ensure the success of any team. I was fortunate to work with him and I would love to do so again in the future.”

“I have been working with Rafael for 2 years and a half. He did a great job of managing my team. His leadership and management skill makes our team like a family and deliver high-quality features for the past 2 years. No matter to the team or myself, he is always passionate and patient to understand the context and requirements and tries his best to support us. He taught me a lot about how to make my career plan and helped me to realize it step by step. I would say he is definitely a valuable asset to any company and I wish I can work with him again in the future.”

“I reported to Rafael during my first 3 years in Salesforce in a highly changing IoT organization. He was very instrumental in jumpstarting my career in engineering management. With the coaching, guidance, and opportunities he provided me, I can't be thankful enough for the door he helped open. He leads with trust while encouraging autonomy and creative problem solving. Provide results, and he will always have your back. Justify value, and he will support your efforts. I'd work with him again with no hesitation.”

“Rafael was my direct manager for over 3 years at Salesforce and he truly exemplified the qualities of a great leader. It's not an easy task for a manager to join and immediately lead a team that has been working together for a long time already. However, through his compassion and understanding, he quickly won the respect of the team. Rafael led with empathy and courage while empowering the team to deliver high value features with quality and performance. Whenever the company went through change or uncertainty, he supported the team along the way, was transparent and helped us voice our concerns. He advocated for each member of the team and was our biggest cheerleader. On a personal level, Rafael had a way of making me always feel comfortable to share my thoughts, whether it was related to work or not, because he showed that he cared and valued my opinions and feelings. He was a great mentor and I learned a lot from him, especially his way of stating his opinions clearly and respectfully. I truly enjoyed my time working with him and strongly believe that he would be the greatest asset to any team, organization and company.”

“Rafael built and transformed the quality team in Demandforce into a functioning department focused on Quality Engineering and Continuous Development. The team began with manual testers and no automation. With fresh new talent and a focus on automation he was able to reduce regression cycles, increase quality and position the product for much more frequent releases. Rafael gets how to build an Agile Quality Engineering organization.”

“Rafael was a pleasure to work with. One of the things I was most impressed by was his ability to make the hard decisions and defend product quality even when under immense pressure. Whether he was dealing with a line engineer reporting to him, a peer, or the CEO himself, Rafael always stated his opinion clearly, firmly, and respectfully. I think that his ability to manage up, down, and horizontally is a really rare and valuable asset.”

“Rafael is one of the most effective technical managers & leaders I've had the pleasure of working with. His ability to draw upon his extensive Agile and TDD experience and add just the right amount of process helps him build great bug-free products. Rafael taught me a lot about keeping a big picture vision while executing on granular features. I try to mimic his seemingly effortless ability to help focus and motivate individuals of various work styles. For all of these reasons, Rafael is sure to be an indispensable asset at any company. On a more personal note, Rafael's a joy to work with and he's one of those people whom everyone turns to for advice. At Intuit, he was instrumental in fostering a close sense of community to a huge office. I would jump at the opportunity to work with him again in the future.”

“Rafael and I first met for an informal lunch conversation arranged by a mutual friend of ours. Our conversation was so impressive that I decided to work for Rafael even though I had a good job at the time. The time has shown that I made the right decision and Rafael has been impressing me ever since. Rafael is technically savvy which is a must quality for a leader in our industry. He quickly assesses the most difficult problems and immediately has several possible solutions with clear pros and cons for each of them. The quality that I value most in Rafael is his compassion towards the people that work for him. He truly understands what primal leadership is which is what makes him such a success. He treats people with dignity and respect and people reciprocate by always going above and beyond for such a leader. Rafael is a visionary and a forward thinker who knows what organizations require to be successful. His technical acumen puts him in a perfect position to oversee his vision to completion but his flexibility allows him to reassess the situation if such a need arises. Overall it has been my pleasure to work for such an exceptional leader as Rafael. He has been my reliable mentor and an insightful advisor and I look forward to our continual mutual collaboration for many years to come.”

“Rafael possess a lot of leadership skills and is able to get the most out of the teams he works with taking in consideration everyone skills. He has honed his skills with legacy applications that posed complex challenges and have succeeded in improving the releases significantly.”

“I know Rafael as a person who removes barriers to get work done. He is so awesome at follow-up and doesn't fear to escalate when needed. Soon after joining CTO within no time he established himself as a go to person for any JIRA related issues and QE leader. He also generated JIRA dashboards that show tasks/tickets progress and status via graphs in a single view. He likes to learn new skills and that sets him apart than his peers.”

“Rafael is one of the most outstanding QA leaders I've had the honor to work with. He joined Off & Away just prior to launch to oversee all aspects of quality assurance, and has been essential in establishing and maintaining an extremely high quality bar for our site and underlying systems from launch to scale. During that time, Rafael excelled on every measure that matters: highly accountable; extremely proactive and driven; excellent communicator; able quickly develop a solid, trusting report with the engineering team; a setter of high standards for himself and those around him. I have no doubt that Rafael would be a great leader for any organization.”

“Rafael led the Quality Assurance team and was able to make significant impacts immediately. With little background in Marketing Automation or Printing technology, he quickly got his team focused on the strategic aspect of quality as part of the product development process, identified our critical quality priorities, and focused on execution - improving the quality of our platform while utilizing QA resources more efficiently. Rafael made significant QA process improvements and made quality assurance predictable and visible while recruiting and leading a global team. We collaborated on a number of efforts and I found him to be thoughtful, results oriented and timely.”

“I was struck by Rafael's comprehensive approach to leadership. He has a unique ability to zoom in on an issue, solicit feedback, define the problem and a solution, push people both hard, but at the same time just gently enough, so that everyone winds up with both a sense of being heard, as well as a sense of accomplishment. He's able to go very deep technically, to a level that in my experience is unusual for management. Because of this, he was not just my manager, but in my role as automation architect, he was also a colleague. He participated in most code reviews with constructive, insightful and encouraging feedback. I would happily work with him again.”

“My interaction with Rafael began when we were negotiating a contract to provide services to Nimbefish, I found Rafael as one of the most astute negotiator. He was candid and practical which helped in establishing a great working relationship. Rafael did a great job of managing our team, he always knew what he wanted and as a great leader he drove the team towards it. He did a great job of onboarding the team and ensuring they understood the business challenges and my team enjoyed working for him. Rafael would be an asset to any organization.”

“Rafael is a Gen Y guy with the vision, business savvy, and technical knowledge of someone 15 years his senior. He's intelligent, always up for a new challenge, can figure anything out and then takes it one step further. He is passionate about technology and extremely fun to work with. Raf really doens't need a recommendation.. interview him and you'll hire him on the spot.”

“Rafael was the first QA manager at Nimblefish. He defined and implemented quality processes, built our on-site team, and established our first off-shore team. During his time at the company, our level of quality improved significantly, as did the speed of our testing processes.”