Behind The Blockchain: an interview with Nuno Barbosa, Engineering Manager at Anchorage Digital

During this interview Nuno shared his views on Web3 and the future of the space. He was kind enough to talk through his career journey and the skills he developed along the way which got him to the position he is in now at Anchorage Digital. Nuno shared some insightful tips on growing your career from engineer to engineering leader - hopefully you learn something from this post and it inspires you down the engineering manager path.

So, let's get into it...

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Jack "For people who don’t know who you are, could you Introduce yourself?"

Nuno "I’m Nuno, happily married, father of a boy and a girl. For the last 5 years I’ve been leading teams and working on a variety of different projects (e.g. e-commerce, online payments, telecommunications, healthcare, etc..) and recently embraced a new challenge as an Engineering Manager at Anchorage Digital, the first OCC regulated entity that handles crypto-assets."

Jack "Can you talk us through your career journey so far?"

Nuno "I started as a developer before finishing my B.Sc. in Computer Science in 2008. My first incursion into the software development industry was during my years at University of Porto, where I’ve worked as the developer for the internal e–learning tools and later moved to work in character animation technologies.

For personal reasons, I had to move out of academia and started working in a banking institution developing their internal real estate portal. Then moved to develop indoor tracking systems, create AR/VR technologies and develop software on-demand.

My first real experience as a team leader was at Jumia. I started working there during 2016 as a senior software engineer and, in 2017, I became the backend team lead. In 2018 I had a chance to work for possibly the biggest Portuguese technology company (Farfetch) where I was an engineering lead and stayed there for 3 years. In 2021, I went to work as an engineering manager at Truphone, an eSim-focused enterprise, and at the end of year I was offered a position as engineering manager in a healthcare technology startup, named Gyant. Unfortunately, because of the current turmoil in the tech industry, I was laid off. This turned out to be a good thing because I was able to join Anchorage Digital."

Jack "Talk us through your current job and what it entails?"

Nuno "I’m an Engineering Manager at Anchorage Digital. My key responsibilities are keeping the team happy and the roadmap on schedule. I’m more focused on the managerial side of things and, although I still love to share my two cents and take on development tasks, I leave technology to the second plane."

Jack "Why did you choose to join Anchorage Digital?"

Nuno "To be honest, what got me really pumped on working at Anchorage Digital was, first, the interviews that I had during the hiring process, where I met a lot of awesome people, and, second, the projects that I would be working on that are at the heart of the company’s business."

Jack "What were the main skills, technical and soft, you needed to develop in order to achieve what you have achieved in your career so far?"

Nuno "That’s a really good question. I had to question that myself in the past. So, first you need to understand that, as a manager, your main concern isn't lines of code but the people that write those lines. Meaning, many core skills you need to develop are related to human interactions (leadership, communication, delegation, accountability, emotional intelligence). I also think that it is really important for an Engineering Manager to have a solid technical background (they do not need to be rockstars but must be aware of what the team is discussing to, (for example, act as a tiebreaker) and must have a good understanding of project management so that he/she is able to negotiate deadlines with stakeholders and identify possible roadblocks before hitting them. In the end, the team needs to trust the manager, see him/her as a leader who motivates and drives the team by his/her words and examples. Be a great mentor!"

Jack "What are the steps someone could take in their career if they wanted to follow in your footsteps?"

Nuno "Find what I didn’t have at the beginning of my leadership journey, a good mentor. Someone capable of defining your steps to grow as a leader, that can give honest feedback if you will be a manager (it is harsh but there are good people that want to be manager but that aren’t suitable to manage), someone who will be your example."

Jack "Why did you initially take an interest in Web3?"

Nuno "My first incursion into crypto-assets was configuring BTC and LTC miners for a previous boss I had. I had a lot of fun doing that and learned a little bit about crypto-currencies. This was in 2014. Later, around 2018, I started noticing a huge increase in interest regarding blockchain technology and decentralized finance (DeFI) and started to investigate more and actually started to invest in crypto."

Jack "In your eyes, what is the biggest impact Web3 will have on the world?"

Nuno "We are going through rough times regarding Web3 because of what happened recently in the crypto-assets world. A core value of Web3 is related to inherent decentralization: trust. Web3 will spark a bunch of regulatory procedures across the world and, what for the last decade and a half, was done without control, governments will have to create laws and regulations to handle everything around Web3. The true impact comes at that point where trust is built and everyone will be able to accept any value generated by any of the Web3 branches as trustworthy."

Jack "Web3 encompasses a lot of areas - from blockchain, cryptocurrency, DeFi, Gaming, NFTs, the Metaverse and more. Do you think all of these areas will be adopted or do you think there will be a specific area which will come out on top? And why?"

Nuno "There are areas that I still don’t understand the direction the industry is taking. Like the Metaverse where I see a bit of chaos and the industry, mainly some big players, pushing hard on the Metaverse while there isn’t a good acceptance. However, when we talk about crypto-assets (currencies, NFTs, etc…) I do believe that these asset-based technologies will prevail because there are people working to build trust in them and there is already a wide acceptance of them. Grabbing a sentence of Robert Kyosaki “Bitcoin is ‘people’s money’, while Gold is ‘God’s money’”, we see that there is already a good amount of trust on crypto-assets. Famous people are already launching NFTs to profit from them (like Cristiano Ronaldo in partnership with Binance) and sports clubs are creating fan tokens, which they even use those tokens to pay to athletes. I see other areas where we might see a boom of using blockchain technology like real estate where you can use a blockchain to register house deeds instead of paper or in insurances where we can also use blockchain to register the evolution of some insurance."

Jack "What do you think the future holds for Web3?"

Nuno "2023 will be a crucial year for some branches of Web3 (like crypto-assets) because of everything we went through this year. But expect a lot more regulation, which is a good thing, and probably more taxation (not that good but there is no way around). There are people going against this evolution since they don’t understand or they are reluctant to change, regulations will come. Still, I honestly think that there is still a lot to do and develop in this Web3 world and I’m pretty sure that we will be able to overcome these hard times and prove that decentralization is the future."

Jack "What does the future hold for you personally?"

Nuno "For now, I’m enjoying every moment working at Anchorage Digital and just trying to learn as much as I can so that I can set the next step steadily. So, being totally honest, professionally, I still don’t have a target for the next one or two years. On the other hand, in my personal life, I want to be there for my family and play as much as I can with my son and daughter :)"

Jack "Finally, what is once piece of advice you would give to someone looking to make a career in Web3?"

Nuno "Learn blockchain by researching a common topic (l suggest Bitcoin because it is the most common). From that point on, you can start learning about other cryptocurrencies, understand how NFT differs, research on how companies (like Anchorage Digital or Binance) build their line of products. Having done that, someone will for sure start to have an initial interest on specific topics and that will define the following steps."

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We really enjoyed understanding Nuno's career journey. He shared some interesting thoughts on the future of Web3 and shared some brilliant tips on skills to learn and develop to build a career in the space.

We'll be keeping a close eye on Nuno's journey!

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To get involved with Behind The Blockchain or for recruitment related conversations reach out to Jack on Jack@unveilrecruitment.com