César Romero

Head of Solution Engineering — Southern Europe

Madrid, Spain  ·  romero.latorre@gmail.com  ·  linkedin.com/in/cesar-romero-b41b6455

César Romero

Profile

I run solution engineering and integration engineering for Southern Europe at PayPal, across Spain, France and Italy. My team works with the largest merchants in the region — travel, marketplaces, retail, transport and regulated gaming.

The job is incremental revenue on large accounts. Finding the conversion, integration or product gap that is quietly costing a merchant money, sizing it with data, building the internal case, then driving product, engineering, identity and risk until the fix ships.

Some of it is deep technical work: tearing down checkout paths by device, hunting latency, instrumenting detection so the same problem does not come back twice. Some of it is convincing a room that has other priorities. I came to it from engineering, not from sales.

Experience

Head of Solution Engineering, Southern Europe

March 2025 — present

I own both solution engineering and integration engineering for the region, with a team spread across Spain, France and Italy and an outsourced partner covering smaller merchants.

The work is escalations, product asks, feature requests, internal unblocking, alignment and testing — plus the reporting layer underneath it, which I rebuilt on our internal data warehouse with LLM-assisted analysis instead of manual pulls.

Head of Integration Engineering

January 2023 — March 2025

The integration half of what I run today, before solution engineering was added to it. Set the integration KPIs and drove the process work to cut time-to-integration.

Senior Solutions Engineer, then Solutions Engineer

June 2020 — January 2023

End-to-end payment solutions for European enterprise merchants, and the technical reference on PSD2/SCA, pay-ins and pay-outs — from C-level conversations down to the development teams doing the integration.

A Spanish buy-now-pay-later fintech, later acquired by Afterpay and folded into Clearpay.

I led the engineering team responsible for merchant integration with the payment gateway, and owned the process end to end — including the onboarding and technical support functions alongside it, and the internal tooling behind the whole thing.

One of the largest casino software platforms in Europe.

I was the architect and author of Alea Play, a third-party games aggregator serving thousands of concurrent users across eight integrated platforms, and led every third-party integration the company had: payments, games, SMS.

System administrator at IdeInnovación, and developer at Open Knowledge Network and Lucarit. Where the technical foundation came from.

Focus areas

Payments

  • Pay-ins and pay-outs
  • PSD2 and strong customer authentication
  • Checkout and conversion
  • Buy now, pay later
  • Gateway and in-app integrations

Technical sales

  • Enterprise discovery
  • C-level to developer stakeholders
  • Business cases
  • Executive demos
  • Escalation management

Engineering

  • REST API design and integration
  • AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform
  • BigQuery and SQL
  • LLM-assisted analysis

Teams

  • Distributed, multi-country
  • Vendor and outsourced delivery
  • Hiring
  • Individual development plans

Education and languages

BSc Software Engineering, Universidad Francisco de Vitoria, 2008–2012. AWS Certified Developer – Associate. Spanish and English, native or bilingual.

The short version

One page, with the numbers this site leaves out.

Download the CV