Thriving in Engineering

Higino Silva is VP of Software Engineering at Bloq.it, the Lisbon-based company building the smart-locker software and hardware behind open parcel-locker networks for carriers including DHL eCommerce, GLS and Vinted Go. A software engineer since 1999, he previously served as CTO at Vita Mojo and CREOATE, VP of Engineering at smava, and Head of Engineering at Farfetch, and has spent the last decade-plus helping companies scale engineering without breaking under their own growth.

This is the Thriving in Engineering Podcast, where we talk to engineers and technical leaders about what AI is actually changing in day-to-day work, past the headlines and the hype.

In this conversation, we discuss:

  1. Why he uses AI to raise the quality of engineering work rather than its volume
  2. How an agent infers the requirement behind a pull request so it can be checked against the original ticket
  3. Why near-zero failure tolerance in parcel logistics decides where AI is allowed in the pipeline
  4. How to measure AI initiatives when the gains resist precise numbers
  5. How Bloq.it Lab lets sales, marketing and operations build with Claude Code inside company guardrails

Higino's details:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/higinosilva/
Bloq.it: https://www.bloq.it/

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What is Thriving in Engineering?

Software engineering isn't just strategy and sprint plans. It's ambiguity, pressure, trade-offs, and people.

Thriving In Engineering helps you navigate all of it.

In the newsletter, Alex Ponomarev distills 25 years of engineering leadership into practical frameworks to help you lead with confidence, stay calm under pressure, and build thriving teams.

The podcast goes deeper, talking to engineers, leaders, and builders across the industry about what AI transformation actually looks like in practice, past the headlines and hype. One guest at a time.