Chief Executive and co-founder of Codility. Trained as a psychologist. Runs one of the largest platforms grading how software engineers think.
She studied minds before she measured engineers. The Codility CEO in a portrait released by the company, 2021.
There is a company that watches roughly a fifth of the world's professional software engineers try to reverse a linked list, and its chief executive holds a master's degree in psychology. She is Natalia Panowicz, and Codility is her company.
Codility sells a coding-assessment platform to enterprises whose recruiting funnels are, by any honest reading of the numbers, unworkable. The pitch is boring, which is the point: give every candidate the same task, score it the same way, and stop pretending that a résumé from a well-known university is a proxy for whether a person can write software. Panowicz has been running the company since July 2019.
Her current headline product is Codility Skills Intelligence, announced in April 2025. It extends the company's original thesis - measure the skill, not the pedigree - from external hiring into internal skill mapping. Engineering managers who once used Codility to decide who to interview now use it to decide who, on the team they already have, could be moved onto the platform migration or the machine-learning project. This is the sort of move a psychologist would make. Panowicz was trained as one.
Before the CEO title she was chief operating officer, a role she took in February 2014, less than two years after she joined the company as a business developer. That earlier version of Codility was small, Polish, and cash-flow disciplined in a way that felt out of place in the early-2010s startup discourse. It grew to more than a hundred employees, opened offices in London, Berlin and San Francisco, and did all of this without institutional venture capital. When Codility did finally raise, in early 2020, it was a $22 million Series A led by Oxx and Kennet - a round announced alongside Panowicz's own move into the CEO seat and the appointment of a new chief revenue officer.
The timing was aggressive. The pandemic broke a few weeks later. Remote hiring, which had been Codility's implicit tailwind since the company was founded, became the entire way the technology industry hired for the next two years. If you interviewed for a software job between roughly March 2020 and 2022, there is a non-trivial chance a piece of Panowicz's software watched you type.
Panowicz studied psychology at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań from 2004 to 2009. This is not the kind of degree one usually finds attached to the leader of a developer-tools company. She followed it with a Master in General Management at Vlerick Business School in Belgium, finishing in 2011, and then briefly did the sort of work most Vlerick graduates do: consulting, in her case at a firm called Durabilis. Before Vlerick she coordinated projects at Forum for Dialogue, a Polish NGO devoted to Polish-Jewish understanding, which is also not a standard résumé line for the CEO of an enterprise SaaS company.
She has told the story in interviews of nearly joining McKinsey out of business school. She made it deep into the process. The final interview, with a country manager, went badly. Performance anxiety, she has said - the ordinary human kind that any candidate on a Codility test today would recognize. The rejection sent her toward operating roles instead of advisory ones. In an interview with Authority Magazine she framed it as a redirection rather than a defeat, which is the sort of framing that only becomes possible in retrospect.
Codility was her second real job. She has now been at it for more than a decade. That is unusual. Most people who join a startup as employee-early spend three or four years there and then leave for the next one. Panowicz stayed, and eventually the company was hers to run.
Panowicz gives interviews in a register that will be familiar to anyone who has read a Harvard Business Review article in the last decade. She talks about psychological safety. She talks about vulnerability. She talks about accountability as the necessary counterweight to safety - a distinction most executives skip. Coming from someone with a psychology background it lands differently than it does from executives who have arrived at the same vocabulary via LinkedIn.
"High-performing teams have both a high degree of psychological safety and accountability," she told her own company's blog. "The more you grow as a human being, the more you are free from dysfunctional patterns and blind spots, the better you can serve your team." Her stated rule for leadership - "it shouldn't be about you" - reads as either a cliché or a discipline depending on how seriously the person saying it takes it. Panowicz has spent seven years as a middle executive at the company she now runs, which suggests she takes it seriously enough.
The most interesting recent question in Codility's market is how you grade a coding test when the candidate can, and does, ask an AI assistant for help. In 2023 the company debuted an assessment feature designed for exactly this world. The bet is that measuring a candidate's ability to collaborate with an AI is more predictive than measuring their ability to remember syntax under pressure. This is a bet that only makes sense if you have thought carefully about what the test is actually testing. Panowicz, again, was trained in what tests actually test.
The 2025 Skills Intelligence product takes the same instinct in a different direction. Instead of asking "can this outside candidate write software," it asks "what does the team we already have actually know how to do." The rise of internal talent marketplaces has been a slow, quiet story in HR technology for years; Panowicz has now put Codility squarely inside it.
Focus on the purpose and nurture a high-performing team; it shouldn't be about you.
High-performing teams have both a high degree of psychological safety and accountability.
When leaders are kind, genuinely curious about other people, and allow themselves to be vulnerable, everybody else on their team feels safer to bring their real selves to work.
The more you grow as a human being, the more you are free from dysfunctional patterns and blind spots, the better you can serve your team.
Personal energy is key. It's part of my job to nurture my personal energy.
She is the CEO and co-founder of Codility, a technical assessment platform used by enterprise engineering teams to screen and evaluate developers.
July 2019, after seven years at the company - first as a business developer and then as COO from 2014.
A master's in psychology at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, followed by a Master in General Management at Vlerick Business School in Belgium.
Public reporting puts Codility's Series A at $22 million in early 2020, with total funding around $24.5 million.
The company is headquartered in London and has offices in Warsaw, Berlin and San Francisco.