About Patrik

Jan, 20 2025

I’m a software engineer turned engineering manager with 20+ years of experience in getting innovative projects started, established, and scaled up.

I spent 20 years with Google Switzerland, 17 thereof as an engineering manager:

experience getting innovative (some would say crazy) projects established.
coaching and mentoring people.
experience working in highly dynamic cross-functional international environment.
managing up to 50 developers.

Selected Projects and Experience

Fiplanner - Co-founder. Financial planning simulation for Switzerland to find your financial independence date. fiplanner.ch

Investor and/or Advisor - I help promising startups. I’m invested in UpLeap, Share.P, Ahead Health, Everyman Health. Successful exits: Deadalean.

Travel Impact Model - Started project to add CO2 emission data to Google Flight Search from voluntary contribution and grew into a project with 20+ FTE engineers and a de-facto industry-wide standard used across the whole industry and serving 65B queries (and still counting). travelimpactmodel.org

Google Shopping, Data Quality and Policy Enforcement - Scale up operations from 3 to 50+ engineers, and 1 to 150+ manual raters. Reduce visible price error rate from 20+% to less than 2%. Roll out unified tooling across all functions (eng, support, sales) for operational management of the data, that was used by 6000+ unique internal users. shopping.google.com

Google, Pension Fund Committee (Personal Vorsorgekommission) - Contributed to design of the pension fund solution for Google Switzerland and oversaw the operations. Developed deep understanding of the pension and the Swiss social security framework.

Lecturer and Teacher - I’ve always enjoyed teaching. I thought the core “operating system” lecture at ETH-Z, and introduction to C# at the Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz, and I established the first onboarding classes for Google Zurich.

Recent Appearances

11/2024 Podium Ticino Partner Day

11/2023 Podium St. Gallen University - Zukunft der Mobilität

06/2023 Presentation Möbius Lugano: Patrik Reali di Google Svizzera per viaggi sempre più sostenibili

06/2023 Article CdT: Viaggi ed emissioni «Così Google educa sul clima»: successo mondiale per un’iniziativa svizzera

12/2022 Article CdT: Attualità: cervelli ticinesi reclutati da Google

Article about.google So ambitioniert wie die Mondlandung

Selected Passions

Cooking - Algorithms with great benefits. See some of my favorite recipes .

Education

2003 PhD in Computer Science, ETH Zurich

1995 Dipl. Inf-Eng, ETH Zurich

Publications

Using Oberon’s active objects for language interoperability and compilation
P. Reali
Doctoral Thesis, ETH Zurich, 2003
ETH Research Collection

P. Reali. Structuring a Compiler with Active Objects. In J. Gutknecht and W. Weck, editors, Proceedings of JMLC, volume 1897 of LNCS, pages 250–262, Zurich, Switzerland, 2000. Springer.

Combining Oberon with active objects
A. R. Disteli, P. Reali
Joint Modular Languages Conference, 1997

Patents

System and method for enabling website owners to manage crawl rate in a website indexing system
V. Fox, A. A. Camp, M. Ibel, P. Reali, J. J. Lilley, K. J. Lai, T. J. Bonkenburg, N. D. Cardwell
US Patent 8,032,518, 2011