How Marin Sarbulescu Scales Global Teams and Turns Developers Into Architects
April 22, 2025 22 min read
What separates high-performing tech organizations from the rest isn’t just talent—it’s leadership that scales. The most effective technology leaders today don’t rely on top-down control. They create cultural alignment, develop engineering leaders from within, and scale teams with intentionality. Marin Sarbulescu, Senior Vice President of Technology at CJ, has built globally distributed teams that deliver with consistency, cohesion, and speed.
With decades of experience, Marin shares his blueprint for driving enterprise-level outcomes, including why relationships outperform raw talent, how transparency builds trust at scale, and how generative AI is reshaping the role of engineering from execution to architecture.
Cultivating Relationships Over Talent
Marin strongly believes that relationships are at the heart of successful teams. No matter how innovative or talented individuals are, without strong interpersonal connections, teams struggle.
"I cannot emphasize enough how important relationships are," Marin says. "They're more important than talent. They're more important than creativity, than innovation, than anything. If two people cannot get along together, they don't understand each other well, there's a huge chance the whole thing is going to go south."
For Marin, leadership involves facilitating connections through shared experiences, in-person collaborations, and open communication, ensuring trust and alignment across global teams.
Scaling Teams with Intention and Transparency
Scaling an engineering organization is challenging, particularly when growth means shifting mindsets. Marin emphasizes transparency, clearly explaining decisions to help team members adapt and embrace the bigger picture.
"Basically, force them into thinking as a business leader and not as a developer," he advises. "Put them in the CEO’s shoes [..] and say, 'Here's the business need, here's the budget, here are the constraints, what do you think we should do best?' That gets their juices flowing." He also emphasizes the importance of a rigorous, inclusive hiring process and pairing new hires with experienced mentors for long-term success.
This approach doesn't just foster understanding; it creates alignment and buy-in, empowering engineers to actively shape the organization's growth trajectory.
Navigating Cross-Cultural Dynamics with Empathy
Managing international teams goes far beyond time zones and workflows—it requires leaders to deeply understand the cultural values, expectations, and communication styles that shape how people work. Marin stresses that cultural alignment is often the difference between collaboration and conflict.
“Even if you’re an amazing technology leader, if you do not understand the culture, you’re doomed to fail,” he says. Whether it’s respecting vacation boundaries in Europe or understanding work pace differences across continents, Marin believes that mutual understanding and cultural onboarding are essential for cohesive teams.
When distributed teams need to collaborate directly, Marin encourages face-to-face time between technical leaders whenever possible, even if full-team travel isn’t feasible. These in-person moments, he says, create the foundation of trust that tools and processes alone can’t replicate. By proactively sharing wins, losses, and even failures across locations, leaders can foster a culture of transparency and shared ownership—one that transcends borders and time zones.
The Transformative Power of Generative AI
Looking forward, Marin sees generative AI not merely as an incremental technological advancement but as a fundamental shift redefining software development. He emphasizes that the developers of the future will become architects, guiding design, structure, and integration rather than simply writing code.
"We are very close to the point where developers will be able to develop in any language they want without writing a lot of code," Marin explains. "You'll develop code by asking the AI to do it for you. You have to know what you're asking, and then you'll have to piece together the puzzle, the building blocks, and test it."
Marin’s transformative vision underscores critical skills such as clear communication, strategic thinking, and adaptive problem-solving, qualities he consistently champions within his teams.
His leadership reminds us that as technology advances, the human elements of empathy, relationship-building, and transparent communication remain foundational to creating teams capable of thriving in an ever-changing landscape.
Transcript
Marin Sarbulescu:
I cannot emphasize enough how important relationships are. They're more important than talent. They're more important than creativity, than innovation than anything. If two people cannot get along together, they don't understand each other well, there's a huge chance the whole thing is going to go south. So creating those relationships, having them work in the trenches together, have them a storyboard, have them design, architect, argue about technologies and about implementation is really important.
Caleb Brown:
Hey everyone and welcome to Keep Moving Forward, the podcast from X-Team for tech professionals who are passionate about growth, leadership, and innovation. I'm your host, Caleb Brown, and in each episode we'll dive into candid conversations with the industry's brightest minds, including seasoned leaders, forward-thinking engineers and visionary experts.
Today I'm excited to welcome to the show Marin Sarbulescu, Senior Vice President of Technology at CJ. Marin's story is one of adaptability and evolution. From his early days building websites in Romania to leading global engineering, operations and data science teams for one of the world's largest advertising networks. In this episode, Marin shares how he's navigated cross-cultural leadership challenges, scaled engineering teams through high-growth phases and guided developers to think like business leaders. We also dive into his perspective on managing distributed teams, recruiting for team fit and the future impact of generative AI on software development. Whether you're leading global teams, scaling engineering organizations, or rethinking how AI will shape the future of development. This conversation is full of practical insights and big-picture thinking. Let's get into it.
Thank you so much for joining, for jumping in here today. Very excited. I've been able to go over your background and look at LinkedIn and things like that. I thought maybe it'd be a good way to kind of kick off walking us through your journey, starting your career in Romania to becoming SVP of technology at CJ.
Marin Sarbulescu:
Yeah, Caleb, thanks for having me here. Looking back, it seems like I had like four lives. They're so different. Like where I grew up and then the first part of my career and then the middle part and then where I'm right now. But it's been a very interesting journey, like over 22 years. So like you said, I'm originally from Romania. I have a background in telecommunication engineering and at that time, like in '97, '98, that was the closest thing to computer sciences that we had in Romania. So my first year of college I got actually my first job as a webmaster. I was doing all kinds of presentation websites. I got a taste for making money and that's always dangerous when you're in college.
And then fourth year of college I got hired by an American company. They were opening their European headquarters in Romania and they wanted me to build and run their web marketing department. It was a very interesting experience for me because I had zero experience in management and I ended up creating a team from scratch. So by 2009, so I was seven years with the company, I immigrated to the US together with my wife. For two years, I was a dependent on her visa, so I had to restrict myself from getting a full-time job in the US. I did all kinds of consultancy jobs like in e-commerce and SEO with some of my European contacts.
And then finally in 2012 we won the green lottery visa. I don't know if you guys know what that is, but basically it gives you permanent residence in the US and the right to work. So I got hired by Fuel Cycle up in Los Angeles. It's a market research cloud startup. Well it was a startup at that time. They're doing online focus groups, like very sophisticated for insights in products and services. I started with the company as an individual contributor and I ended up, after seven years as a senior vice president of research and development, I was leading multiple technology groups, engineering, DevOps, data science and analytics, and a few other small teams.
2020, the pandemic starts, it just throws everything upside down. I was getting bored in my naivete with my previous company and I said, "Hey, you know what? I want to jump into a startup, like a more aggressive, faster growing startup. So let me find something like that." And I found something that a bit more than I can chew. So I had an 18-month stint with the startup up in LA as well. They were focused on a calling center, AI-driven software, and I was their VP of engineering for almost a year. It was too aggressive for me know, 60 hour weeks were the minimum and I think I'm too old for that. Also, you, we had a divergence of values, but long story short, after almost a year I'm like, "You know what? I'm done with startups. I just want to be part of a medium to large company."
So I found CJ, which is part of Publicis. Publicis is a huge, 14 billion French multinational advertising giant. It's one of the big four agency companies in the world alongside WPP, Inner Public and Omnicom. So I started working for them in the middle of the pandemic. Currently I'm the senior vice president of technology and I'm leading the engineering group, technology operations and data science and analytics. This job is pretty interesting. Actually, it's very interesting and also very challenging because it's a very challenging mix of technology and revenue responsibilities, and the latter part, the revenue, being responsible for a commercial group that can directly affect the revenue of the company. It's something very new to me, but I really enjoy it and I also find that it goes very well with the technology responsibilities that I have.
Caleb Brown:
That's a very interesting journey and good on you for realizing that that startup environment in particular wasn't what you were looking for and wasn't what you wanted and gave it a shot for about a year. I was really fascinated actually, when I rewind a little bit. It was really fascinating when you were talking a little bit about college and I actually wanted to talk even pre-college because it sounds like you were already kind of on that trajectory and already interested in tech in general and trying to get your hands on the closest thing you could in college. But you had your first technology management role at a young age. And so I am curious some of those early life lessons in leadership. But I am a little bit curious to even go pre-college and just to learn a little bit about what kind of interested you in tech from the get-go really. Because I think so many folks in technology have interesting stories about childhood or adolescence in regards to how they became interested in tech.
Marin Sarbulescu:
Talking to my parents would be a better choice because they would be able to tell you that I took apart every electronic gadget that we had in the home at that time and I was just interested in how they work. We had a reel-to-reel, like a Soviet reel-to-reel from the eighties and I started by trying to make the speakers go louder and I took everything apart and then when I put it back, it didn't work. So I had to get into the details and understand what exactly did I screw up and how to package it back together. And then I moved to our VCR and then I moved to the cassette player. So I just took everything apart. I always had an interest on how things work.
And now that I look back, the reason why I chose management and working with people is because I'm always very interested in how people work. And that's a major challenge that I see a lot of, throughout my career I saw my peers having, not understanding who are the right people for their team, how to make the most of putting them into the right seats and how to communicate with them and making sure that they're most successful at what they're doing. So again, it started with technology, but I think beyond that, if you want to go back even farther, I've always been interested in how things work and it can be hardware, it can be software where it can be people, it can be processes, can be relationships and so on.
Caleb Brown:
Something I see here at X-Team, we employ software developers all over the world. And so I wanted to ask you a little bit about kind of your experience working across sort of different countries' cultures and sort of how that shaped your management philosophy because you've seen and worked with kind of different cultures and as have I here at X-Team, I think that's always fascinating to see kind how that translates into work life. So curious about your take on that.
Marin Sarbulescu:
I mean that's such a big subject. I could talk about it for weeks, but it is challenging, especially at the beginning, working with teams from five or six countries or more important from different cultures. Because that's what makes the big difference. Not necessarily the country. Like in Romania, like in Europe, like working with somebody from Germany versus the Netherlands. It's pretty much the same thing because the cultures are very close. But working with somebody from India as opposed to Eastern Europe as opposed to South America as opposed to US, there are major differences there. Good and bad, because again, no culture is perfect.
But I think one major thing you have to have under your belt is understanding the cultures. Even if you're an amazing manager and an amazing technology leader, if you do not understand the culture, you're doomed to fail. You have to understand what makes them tick. You have to understand what kind of values they have, what their goals are, what kind of incentive matrix they have. And then that's one thing. The other thing which is even more complicated is if you have to get the teams working together, maybe on the same project, so a team from US and a team from Romania or a team from India working on the same projects, that's when it gets complicated.
Like it's not an easy thing because even if you understand both cultures and you can coordinate the whole thing and make sure that you have the right people fit, when the engineers start working together, that's when a lot of misunderstandings can start creeping up and you can pretty much derail, the whole project. So it is a lot of work. Again, it starts with you understanding the cultures and then it continues with you preparing your teams for working together on the projects and preparing them, like giving them, onboard them on each other's cultures and values and how different people from different cultures, different countries see things differently. And from there it's just a matter of, I'll say staying on top of it to make sure that the teams start working together and they get through that initial phase of getting to know each other, start creating those relationships, start creating the trust basically.
Caleb Brown:
Yeah, absolutely. Something we talk about kind of a lot on this podcast and I think for a good reason is I was kind of talking about scaling in many different contexts, but specifically kind of scaling engineering and engineering operations. And you have a good background in that. I'm curious, what have been like the biggest challenges in growing an engineering organization from something like maybe 50 folks all the way up to kind of several hundred. It's surely a big task, but sometimes certainly has to be done. And I'm interested in your experience there.
Marin Sarbulescu:
The biggest hurdle for me, not hurdle, but the biggest difficulty would be how do you change the mindset of the people that until that moment you worked with them and they did a really good job? And how do you prepare them? Are they even capable of sticking with you and being part of this team that you want to build 500 people? Because as companies go through different life stages, you start in a garage and there are only two people working. And they do everything from developing to answering the phone. And then you bring your uncle and your cousin in and you have four people and then you move to a startup and you go to an office and you have eight people, you have 10 people.
Very rarely, the people that you started with and you had in that small team that was so congealed and it was working together very well. Very rarely those will be the same people that will help you increase the size of organization to 500. Because the same thing that made them very valuable to your four people team, the same thing will basically prevent them from being able to run just as well in a 500 team. It's just a very different mindset.
Caleb Brown:
Yeah, absolutely. So you touched on this, but I want to drill in a little bit more. For existing engineers, as you're kind of starting this scaling process or during the process of scaling up, is there anything sort of specific that you can do or that you've done with the success to help kind of senior engineers, folks you're already working with, adapt their mindset, and kind of be ready for that organization to rapidly scale?
Marin Sarbulescu:
I think the only thing you can do is be very upfront and explain what it means and why do you need to do that. Basically force them into thinking as a business leader and not as a developer. Because there is a need, why we have to grow to 200, there is a need why we have to start a team in India. So rather than just giving orders and keeping them in the dark and saying you have to adapt to work with your Romanian developers, just put them in the CEO shoes, put them in the SAP of technology shoes and say, "Here's the business need, here's the budget, here are the constraints, what do you think we should do best?"
And that's going to get them juices flowing. They're going to start thinking and they're very smart people. And I'm so lucky to be working with some amazing engineers, which are in the latter part of their career. So they have a lot of experience under their belt. And they have kids and now they put their kids from college. So they're not only developers, they also, they understand what a budget is and how do you have to manage that. And how sometimes you have to make compromises. So put them in the shoes and say "These are the constraints, these are the pros, these are the cons, these are the opportunities." 90% of the time they will get to the same conclusions as you. And they don't have to like it, but they will understand why it needs to be done.
Caleb Brown:
Yeah. You said something really interesting there about just understanding the why, not doing something just because the budget's there, but understanding where you really want to get to. And then I think, making sure that the rest of the team understands that message and right, you're treating folks like adults and letting them in on this and understand the budgets and everything. I think that makes a lot of sense. Kind of continuing on talking about scaling, how do you kind of maintain sort of the velocity needed but also the quality standards when you're rapidly growing a team and potentially a product or something along those lines that the team's working on?
Marin Sarbulescu:
I think it comes down to having a few mandatory checkpoints. One would be how good is your recruiting process? Do you recruit like on a conveyor belt from like the Ford factory in the 1910s? You just go through HR, you see a developer, you ask them their name and then you hire them and you hope for the best? Or do you actually go, do you have some good screening in there. Like are you looking for the right fit? What are the things that you're looking at when you're recruiting? So strong recruiting, that's the first thing.
Second thing would be the onboarding. Your onboarding has to be bottomed up as well. You cannot just hire someone regardless of how smart they are. You cannot just throw them in the middle of a project or of a team and then let them sink or swim. So your onboarding has to be right.
The third thing would be, I would say that you have to pair the new developers or the new employees with older, well not older, but with very experienced engineers with a lot of expertise and a lot of knowledge about the projects they're working on, legacy knowledge about the company and so on. So for the first, I'll say six to eight months, at least in our case, I would have them pair like any newbie paired with a very senior engineer. And I think after nine to maybe 16 months, you're going to have a really good engineer in your team, fully productive and you won't be able to make the difference between them and someone that was in your team for like three years.
Caleb Brown:
Absolutely. Another thing we talk about a lot about beyond scaling is kind of managing global teams, distributed teams and things like that. Curious, we talked a little bit about culture, but I'm curious how you've kind of effectively bridged cultural differences. We are talking about distributed teams working together from the US and India, Latin America, everywhere, as well as just kind of building trust between those distributed teams in general. Just wanted a little bit of your insights there on effectively managing that and having a good solid team across the board.
Marin Sarbulescu:
If I would have a choice, I would have each team work on completely separate projects. That's the easiest way because it's the easiest way to manage it. As long as they don't interact, then you don't have to worry about cultural differences or incentives or anything like that. But most of the time you cannot do that. Most of the time you will have some sort of overlap, some sort of interaction. When that happens, if possible, I would try to get the teams together in person as much as possible, but sometimes it's just not feasible to fly over 50 developers from India to the US or the other way around.
So what do you want to do is you want to pick up the technical leaders and the team leaders and try to do that cross-pollination by flying them over here or over there and spend time together. I cannot emphasize enough how important relationships are. They're more important than talent. They're more important than creativity, than innovation than anything. Like if two people cannot get along together, they don't understand each other well, there's a huge chance, like the whole thing is going to go south. So creating those relationships, having them work in the trenches together, have them know storyboard, have them design, architect, argue about technologies and about implementation is really important. So bringing people together, very important.
Second thing would be reviewing each other's designs, reviewing each other's code, sharing with each other what challenges and what wins they had. That's also very important and you have to do it in a consistent way. Sharing failures, it's very important. Let's say that your US team just went through some tough times and they failed at something that they were supposed to write. Sharing that with the other teams, I think it's a huge win because it shows that you, you're willing to come forward, you're human, you're making mistakes, it just feels everyone feel better and increases the trust between the teams.
Caleb Brown:
Yeah. Can you share an example or a time when you've kind of had to hopefully successfully navigate cultural misalignment between international teams?
Marin Sarbulescu:
A funny thing about US, well funny, it's not funny, but it's interesting. US in general, and this is not just me coming up with this, but there are statistics, there are numbers out of their economies that are lot smarter than me, and US works longer hours and that's not longer hours that pretty much the rest of the globe. Maybe some countries in Asia, but for sure longer hours than Europe. So you might have situations where somebody in Europe goes on vacation. And vacations in Europe are like sacred cows. When you go on vacation in Europe for like two weeks, you close your phone. I'm not saying everybody's doing that, but a lot of people and for good reasons, they're shutting off their phones and they're even some countries where they're laws against actually trying to contact somebody that is on vacation.
So then you're going to have an American trying to get ahold of somebody that is on vacation in August, vacationing out on the seaside somewhere in Europe. And the American will come back to me and will say, "Hey, I cannot get ahold of Marin in Romania." And they've been trying to call Marin or to email or to text, and then Marin comes back to me and says, "Hey, what's going on? I've been assaulted in my vacation, this is not acceptable. My country has laws against this." By the way, this is an imaginary example. I'm trying not to be very specific.
Caleb Brown:
Totally understand.
Marin Sarbulescu:
That's something that can happen. It happened to me before, not exactly between the two countries and with these names, but it's a tricky thing. Because then you have to explain to the American, "Hey, this is how Europeans work." And then the American would be like, "Yeah, but then why don't I start doing the same thing? When I go on vacation, why do I have to get my laptop with me when my European friends and colleagues don't have to do that?" So that's one example where, sometimes you just have to say, "Hey, it is what it is." Like you live in a country, you're in a completely different environment here, with its own advantages and disadvantages. In other countries, they just think differently. And again, it's not better or worse, it's just different. So you just have to educate both parties. And again, they don't have to like it, but they will understand and they will get over it.
Caleb Brown:
I'm curious how you screen for kind of a team fit, in the hiring process, obviously with keeping that in mind.
Marin Sarbulescu:
Well, ideally you want to be able to have 20 hours of interviews with the same candidate. But you can because there are other companies competing for them and so on. But at least at CJ, I think we have a really, it's the best recruiting process I've ever seen in my life. And I'm not just saying that because I'm with CJ, it's just the reality. There are a few very interesting things, but one step would be like a panel interview with three or four or even five engineers from the team. So you have your candidate, it goes through a bunch of steps and then it gets into these steps where they get the opportunity to ask questions and to be asked questions by a panel of four to five people.
Those four to five people from your team, they should be as diverse as possible. So it's not just your male, between 40 and 45, six foot tall. It's like it has to be diverse, so from diverse backgrounds, cultures, diverse knowledge. And basically at the end you get a grading, for the lack of a better word, from a one to five on various topics on the candidate. And that's the best measure of success that you can have. Because if the future team likes them, then you won't have to battle. And to me that's a lot more important because you're saying, you're mentioning like the genius jerks. It's a lot more important to have a good engineer that fits the team very well than to have an amazing, brilliant engineer that their team don't like them, or they're not looking forward to working with them.
Caleb Brown:
Absolutely. I was curious what kind of emerging technologies or trends are just exciting you right now? Whether that's something that's relevant to our conversation of how that can change or transform distributed teams, or really just in general on the tech side, just what tech and trends you've got your eye on you think are exciting?
Marin Sarbulescu:
Good question. I think with technology, looking back what kind of technologies we had in 20 years ago, 25 years ago when I first started taking apart my reel to reel tapes, I think that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The variations, the programming languages that we see, they continue to simplify the developers cognitive load, like lightening up and simplify their work. So they become wrappers on top of wrappers, on top of wrappers. So you can do more with less code and with less cognitive load. So I love that trend.
But I think that what happened in the last two years with generative AI and with Copilot and with ChatGPT, it's like instead of increasing progress by a ratio of one, this is like a ratio of 20. Because we are at the point, we're very close to the point where developers will be able to develop in any language they want without writing a lot of code. The only thing they would have to... Well, not the only thing, but I'm simplifying things obviously. The only thing they would have to do is to be able to communicate with, let's say with Copilot in a way that copilot understand. So they will become, I would say, more of architects and designers and testers than developers. You will not develop code by typing, you'll develop code by asking the AI to do it for you.
And you'll have to be very good at doing that. You have to know what you're asking and then you'll have to piece together the puzzle, the building blocks, you have to be able to test it to make sure that it does what needs to be done. And that's your developer of the future. So, long story short, I think generative AI, Copilot, ChatGPT, that's like the biggest spike of innovation that I've seen in technology since I've started understanding how to spell technology.
Caleb Brown:
Absolutely. Yeah, totally agree and right, it is a skill in itself of understanding how to communicate with these AI agents, but you're absolutely right. And last one for you, because I do want to be respectful of your time, but a question I like to always kind of close this podcast out with. If there's something that you could sort of wave a magic wand and change about this industry, about the tech world, tech culture, I'm always interested in guests on what that would be. And so I'd like to hear your answer to that. If there's something you could change instantly, what that would be.
Marin Sarbulescu:
I think that there are a few things I can think of. In general, I would love if the business leaders, the business part of an organization would understand a little bit better how technology works and how engineering works. To understand that there are no magic bullets. There are a few variables that you have from a business perspective that you want to play with. You have the budgets, you have the speak to markets, and you have the quality. When you increase one of that buckets, the other one or the other two are going to start decreasing.
So I would love if, if the business schools would have a chapter or a class dedicated to how software engineering works, because software engineering is part of everything right now. Like any company you go to, they do some sort of development. It can be full software engineering, low code, no code, but they do that. But the constraints are the same. So if business people would understand, business leaders, commercial leaders will understand a little bit more about engineering, that would be a great thing.
The other thing that I would like to... But there's no going around this, is that there's pressure from the market to be able to put your product or service out there as soon as possible. And when you're doing that, you're cutting corners, there's no going around it. And because of that, the public, they use their software in one or another. They have a lot of bugs starting from cars to software, they're using applications, websites and so on. I wish there would be a different way of handling that, but I don't have a solution for it. So I have a magic wand, but I just don't know what to ask it for.
Caleb Brown:
Well, as you said, that is a hard question, but I think you answered it very well. I absolutely agree with you. Couldn't agree more, especially on the business side of things. That would be beautiful if that was part of business curriculum. But yes, Marin, thank you so much for joining. I really enjoyed this chat. Learned a lot. I feel like we really kind of dug into your expertise on tech teams and distributed teams and that was really interesting. I thank you very much for being here.
Marin Sarbulescu:
Same here, Caleb. Thank you so much. See you guys next time.
Caleb Brown:
What a fascinating conversation with Marin about building global tech teams, scaling with intention and leading with both empathy and strategy. One of the biggest takeaways for me was his perspective on helping engineers evolve into business thinkers, inviting them into the why behind decisions and aligning them with broader goals. It's a powerful reminder that leadership isn't just about direction, it's about inclusion and trust.
I also appreciated his honest reflections on navigating cultural differences, the importance of relationships and distributed teams, and how creating shared understanding can make or break collaboration. And of course, his insights on the rise of generative AI and the changing role of developers were especially timely. As Marin said, the developer of the future will be part architect, part communicator, and part problem solver, skills that go far beyond just writing code. Thank you Marin, for sharing your journey and wisdom with us. And thank you to our listeners for being part of this conversation. It's stories like these that remind us why we keep moving forward.
Join us next time for more insightful conversations with tech leaders who inspire us to grow, lead, and innovate, find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube Music. And don't forget to share this episode if it resonated with you. Until next time.
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