How Mercado Libre built Latin America's most valuable company: 18k engineers, 30k deploys a day, and their own fleet of planes | Sebastian Barrios

Brought to you by:

Merge—A single API to add hundreds of integrations into your app

Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security

LinkedIn Ads—Reach professionals and drive results for your business

Sebastian Barrios was the longtime head of product and engineering at Mercado Libre, the largest company in Latin America—valued at over $100 billion and home to more than 100,000 employees. There, he led a team of more than 18,000 engineers across 18 countries and oversaw an astonishing 30,000 code deployments a day. Before Mercado Libre, he founded multiple startups, including a ridesharing company that competed directly with Uber in Latin America. And at just 17, he got a personal phone call from Steve Jobs asking him to take his app off the App Store. Today, Sebastian is the SVP of Engineering at Roblox.

What you’ll learn:

1. Why Mercado Libre operates with 95% fewer PMs than typical tech companies (and how it actually works)

2. How to maintain product quality with 30,000 daily deployments and distributed ownership

3. The weekly email system Sebastian uses to maintain alignment with leadership

4. How to build a culture of radical candor and direct feedback in a traditionally hierarchical region

5. The counterintuitive approach to product reviews that keeps 18,000 engineers aligned

6. How to evaluate hype cycles (crypto, AI) pragmatically while staying innovative

Some takeaways:

1. Steve Jobs personally called 17-year-old Sebastian, telling him they were banning his battery-draining app and changing the App Store rules as a result.

2. Mercado Libre has 18,000 engineers but only 1,000 PMs—about 5% compared with the typical 20% to 30% ratio. They hire engineers who can understand both what’s technically possible and what users actually need. The key is that their interview process tests for product