Raf Gemmail

(Previously Director of Engineering for the Sailthru platform. Promoted to Senior Director to lead engineering for the Marigold Loyalty product; continued role following acquisition by Zeta Global.)

Head of engineering for the Loyalty platform, a global SaaS product generating > $50M+ ARR and supporting major retail and hospitality brands.

Responsible for engineering delivery, platform reliability and technical strategy for the Loyalty platform.

• Lead distributed engineering teams of 50+ engineers and QA across New Zealand and the Philippines operating in a remote-first SaaS engineering organisation.
• Engineering teams operate a global loyalty platform processing hundreds of millions of real-time events from POS systems and enterprise integrations.
• Previously led platform and data engineering for the Sailthru messaging platform delivering billions of email, push, in-app and SMS messages each week for global retail and media brands.
• Introduced Big Room Planning with Shape-Up style team involvement at Sailthru, improving Product–Engineering alignment and delivery predictability across multiple teams.
• Formed a Staff+ enablement group and work closely alongside them to guide platform architecture, unblock teams and accelerate delivery.
• Introduced engineering productivity measurement across teams, capturing delivery friction and identifying environment and sandbox issues reclaiming ~100 hours of developer time per month.
• Led cultural shift from siloed delivery to shared engineering ownership by embedding QA earlier in development and aligning engineering and SRE around production responsibility.
• Lead response and follow-up for critical production incidents, coordinating engineering teams and driving post-incident improvements in testing, rollout safety and platform stability.
• Lead a data platform modernisation initiative moving from a third-party data platform to a managed AWS solution expected to deliver multi-million dollar annual savings.
• Champion adoption of AI-assisted development across engineering and QA teams including Copilot, Cursor and Claude, establishing internal champions and evolving best practices for agentic development workflows.
• Act as senior engineering contact for enterprise customers including production escalations and technical discussions with major global brands.

Promoted from Head of Product to Head of Technology to lead engineering, platform strategy and delivery in a high-growth edtech environment.

Scaled the platform and engineering organisation to support growth from single-digit cohorts to nearly 200 learners across international programmes.

• Built and led a leadership layer of 6 Tech Leads reporting directly, with roughly 20 direct and indirect reports across platform and delivery teams.
• Led in a junior-heavy environment where mentorship was central, establishing coaching rhythms and clear engineering expectations to lift delivery quality.
• Built and led platform engineering capability supporting global education programmes and internal operational systems.
• Introduced automation across internal systems including identity onboarding and platform operations using Terraform and infrastructure-as-code.
• Partnered with academic leadership to create an NZQA-approved workplace technology qualification integrating real engineering delivery into learner and graduate outcomes.

Seconded as Head of Technology for sister contracting organisation Parasol, responsible for establishing enterprise engineering placements and technical delivery.

• Authored the technical Statement of Work (SoW) that secured a multi-team engineering engagement with Northpower, a major New Zealand electricity provider.
• Embedded and supported engineering teams working inside enterprise environments, partnering with internal architects and developers.
• Led technical onboarding (Sprint 0), platform setup and engineering practices for teams delivering in unfamiliar technology stacks including .NET.
• Mentored engineers through enterprise delivery while developing polyglot engineering capabilities across multiple stacks.