Front Page · Late Autumn

Engineering Leader, Building the Future of Digital Media.

Engineering manager at Nine, in publishing. Eleven years of writing software, four leading teams. Football on Saturdays, skateboard during the week, snowboard when the season turns — and a curiosity that needs more attention than it gets. This page is the small print — the notebook, the shelves, the route.

Luiz Cavalieri mark

BY LUIZ CAVALIERI

FILED SYDNEY

SET IN BRICOLAGE / FRAUNCES

Achievements · Expertise · Route · Writing↓ Scroll
01

Leadership achievements.

Three pieces of work I'm prepared to talk about — the people side, the platform side, and the practice that ties them together.

SECTION 01
SELECTED OUTCOMES
03 ENTRIES
Editorial Platform

Scaling editorial workflows: WordPress to React.

Cross-team migration delivering a modern editorial experience with zero downtime — supporting 300+ journalists across major Australian mastheads.

React · GraphQL · WordPress API · AWS · Team Leadership
AI & Newsroom

AI in the editorial workflow.

Drove the team's adoption of AI across editorial engineering — drafting helpers, summarisation, image & metadata pipelines, prompt patterns and an evaluation rhythm. Built around editorial trust, with humans firmly in the loop.

LLMs · Prompt Design · Eval Harness · Team Adoption
People & Practice

From IC to manager: building the team.

Mentorship rhythms and career frameworks during a rapid growth phase. Four progressions, lower turnover, and an engineering culture that talks honestly about craft.

Mentorship · Career Frameworks · Hiring · Culture
02

Technical expertise.

The areas I keep my hands in — from AI in publishing to the unglamorous work of mapping how a team actually gets things done.

SECTION 02
PRACTICE AREAS
09 DOMAINS

AI & ML

AI for publishing.

LLM tooling, RAG patterns, prompt design and evals — applied to editorial work with care.

LLMs · RAG · Evals · Prompt Patterns

Workflow Efficiency

Making the work flow.

Removing friction from editorial & engineering pipelines. Automation where it earns its keep; restraint everywhere else.

Automation · CI/CD · Editorial Tooling · Toil Reduction

Process Mapping

Mapping the terrain.

Process modelling, value-stream mapping and BPMN where it helps a team see itself clearly — before redesigning anything.

BPMN · Value Streams · Service Design

AI Engineering

AI features, built to last.

Building AI-powered features the publishing team actually trusts. Eval harnesses, observability, and the quiet plumbing behind "magic".

LLM Apps · Eval Harness · Observability · Pipelines

Engineering Leadership

Teams, careers, strategy.

Building, growing and steering engineering teams across multiple concurrent initiatives.

Team Building · Performance · Hiring · Cross-team

Content Management

CMS & editorial systems.

Deep practical knowledge of CMS architecture, multi-tenant publishing, and the workflows behind a newsroom.

WordPress · Gutenberg · React CMS · Multi-tenant

Full-Stack

Web at scale.

Modern, opinionated stacks. Type-safe by default, observable by design.

React · TypeScript · GraphQL · Node · Postgres

Media & Publishing

High-traffic publishing.

Newsroom workflows, content distribution and resilient delivery on busy days.

Distribution · Newsroom Tools · High Availability

Strategy

Migrations, redesigns, re-platforming.

Planning and executing the kind of work that takes more than one quarter.

Architecture · Migration · Performance · Roadmaps

The best problems sort themselves out somewhere between gear changes.
— Notebook · Wonnangatta · May
03

From developer to engineering leader.

The route, told briefly — the balance between technical practice and people leadership.

SECTION 03
WAYPOINTS
03 STAGES
2015

Started writing for the web.

First production code, first deploy, first rollback at 3am. The kind of beginning where you don't yet know how much you don't know.

SEG 01
2018 — 2022

Got quieter, more useful.

Senior IC. The point where you stop trying to be the smartest person in the room and start trying to make the room smarter.

SEG 02
2022 →

Engineering manager.

Engineering manager at Nine, publishing division. Editorial tooling, newsroom systems, AI in the workflow, and a small group of very good engineers I get to work for.

SEG 03
04

Writing notes from the desk.

Thoughts on engineering leadership, software architecture, AI in publishing, AI Engineering and building good teams.

SECTION 04
BLOG · ESSAYS
ONGOING