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Mihnea Dobrescu-Balaur

Engineering Leader @ Stripe

Mihnea is an Engineering Leader at Stripe, building user-facing reliability products and driving company-level AI objectives. He helped bootstrap Stripe's Bucharest site from the ground up: shaping its charter, forming early teams, and delivering products demoed publicly at Stripe Sessions. His track record is taking ambiguous 0→1 bets and turning them into resilient, widely adopted solutions that bridge local execution with global impact.


Before Stripe, Mihnea scaled Bolt's Geo Services domain from a handful of developers to five distributed teams, building mapping, routing, and search systems that matched or outperformed Google Maps in key markets. He's been a CTO at a crypto startup, a mentor at Techstars, and spent nearly five years at Hootsuite growing from engineer to manager of multiple teams. Earlier still, he contributed to Rust's core tooling, interned twice at Mozilla, and taught algorithms at Politehnica University of Bucharest.


Deeply committed to the Romanian tech ecosystem, Mihnea focuses on helping senior engineers transition into leadership and existing managers sharpen their craft. He's drawn to the hard problems: calibrations, difficult conversations, hiring at scale, and navigating complex stakeholder dynamics. He takes particular pride in having identified, formed, and grown successful engineering managers throughout his career, and is happy to share pragmatic guidance on what it takes to thrive at top-tier tech companies.

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