I help engineering organizations adopt AI tools in ways that actually stick.
I’m Dario Mercado: a senior full-stack engineer with a prior career as a VP at Silicon Valley Bank. That mix lets me speak fluently with developers, admins, and executives while keeping the work anchored in adoption, retention, and expansion.
I’m most useful where technical depth meets organizational change: guiding rollout strategy, turning high-value use cases into repeatable workflows, and translating customer or stakeholder feedback into sharper product and engineering decisions.
startup relationships managed at SVB
feature adoption lift at Kantata
production incidents on Ario’s pipeline
Open to senior technical roles
A credible bridge between engineering execution, product judgment, and executive decision-making.
Five years as a VP at Silicon Valley Bank gave me real repetition with CTOs, founders, and operating leaders managing change under pressure.
Six years as a full-stack engineer means I can talk rollout details with developers, admins, and field engineers without hand-waving.
I focus on measurable usage, workflow durability, and business impact rather than treating enablement as a one-time training event.
The work that excites me sits at the center of technical rollout, workflow design, and engineering leverage.
Rollout strategy matters, but durable adoption is the real test. My instinct is to operationalize what works, measure it, and keep refining with the customer.
The strongest signals in my background point to durable technical and business impact.
Managed and expanded a portfolio from roughly 100 to 500+ startup relationships while building the operating rhythms needed to support over $1B in deposits.
Pattern-matching across ambitious technical customers, executive stakeholders, and expansion opportunities.
Led a multi-month redesign of a core task management workflow across Rails, GraphQL, and React for a complex B2B SaaS platform.
50% increase in feature adoption after launch, with stronger retention signals and better day-to-day usability.
Architected an asynchronous pipeline pulling data from 15 consumer sources while coordinating contractors and protecting reliability.
Zero production incidents during my tenure, plus the engineering credibility to guide sophisticated users through implementation details.
I care about the difference between AI demos and AI behavior change.
Strong opinions on what makes AI tooling sticky inside engineering orgs: low friction, visible wins, and credible workflow change.
Hands-on with modern coding tools and LLM workflows across product engineering, prototyping, and system design.
Able to separate novelty from durable value and explain that difference clearly to both practitioners and leadership.
That is the work I find most compelling: helping engineering teams change how they work, not just what software they have access to.
The common thread in my work is helping technical teams move faster with better judgment.
Sometimes that looks like senior full-stack engineering. Sometimes it looks like rollout strategy, technical enablement, or product feedback loops. The through-line is the same: align the work to outcomes and make the systems around it better.
Let's talk about engineering leadership, AI workflows, and building better systems.
I'm open to consulting work, senior full-stack engineering roles, and technical opportunities where product adoption and execution both matter.