Manuel Villarejo

2024-03 — Present

Director of IT

Expenti.com · Málaga, Spain

• Defined the annual technology strategy and cascaded business objectives into department-level OKRs, aligning Engineering, Product, and Operations around shared outcomes and establishing cross-functional accountability
• Led IT through a corporate carve-out — building the entire function from 12 to 25 engineers for a newly independent gaming organisation of 250 employees, establishing governance, vendor management, and service operations from the ground up

2023-05 — 2024-03

Director of Engineering and Architecture

TheWorkshop.com · Málaga, Spain

• Led digital transformation and consolidation of engineering across Europe and APAC, directing a team of 90 engineers across disciplines and seniorities
• Directed the full technology carve-out and separation programme following corporate divestiture — replicating and integrating all core enterprise services on-premise to ensure operational continuity across Europe and APAC

2020-09 — 2023-07

Head of IT

TheWorkshop.com · Málaga, Spain

• Rebuilt the IT function from 20 engineers following a corporate restructuring, scaling to 60 IT professionals across Europe and the UK and modernising operations with Agile delivery squads with follow-the-sun coverage across Europe and APAC
• Secured three consecutive ISO 27001 certifications, building the repeatable information security management programme later extended across subsequent organisations

2018-11 — 2020-09

Head of Infrastructure

TheWorkshop.com · Málaga, Spain

• Restructured and modernised infrastructure across virtualisation, storage, network, and security domains, improving platform resilience and reducing operational risk
• Managed vendor selection, procurement, and contract governance for infrastructure refresh programmes

2015-10 — 2018-10

Monitoring and Corporate Tooling Manager

TheWorkshop.com · Málaga, Spain

• Managed Atlassian Jira/Confluence suite for 2,000+ users across HR, finance, engineering, and operations
• Built the organisation's monitoring stack from scratch (Prometheus, Loki, Grafana, InfluxDB, New Relic, Elastic APM, AppDynamics APM, Icinga), taking it from zero to full-stack real-time detection and alerting across on-premise products and infrastructure

2013-10 — 2015-10

DevOps Engineer

TheWorkshop.com · Málaga, Spain

• Supported the core platform team across 500+ products using Java and Atlassian CI/CD stack (Bamboo, Bitbucket, JIRA)
• Developed a critical configuration management component adopted across all company products

2012-04 — 2013-10

DevOps & Monitoring Engineer

Riplife Technologies · Málaga, Spain

• Rebuilt monitoring infrastructure across 5+ data centres covering distributed corporate and enterprise systems
• Implemented initial CI/CD pipelines and full change management practices for core platform and bonus team products

2011-03 — 2012-04

Senior Linux Administrator

IGT · Gibraltar

• Delivered IGT's first cloud service in Europe — from a greenfield facility to a fully operational custom-built data centre in 12 months
• Designed and built Linux server infrastructure and systems for a cloud-hosted gaming platform from scratch

2010-04 — 2011-03

Technical Project Manager

Stan James · Gibraltar

• Led technical project management of a video streaming solution integration with a major streaming provider

2006-09 — 2010-04

IT System Administrator / Network Engineer

Stan James · Gibraltar

• Managed on-premise distributed platform spanning three locations

2006-02 — 2006-09

IT Engineer

Tellonline · Spain