RESPONSIBILITIES- Strategy goal setting.- People management.- Project management.- Reporting on progress.- Stakeholder management.- Budget planning for team members and company-wide subscriptions.- Management of engineering processes.

As a founder of the startup studio, I focused on practical and straightforward projects that could make a real difference. I was committed to creating practical products that serve the needs of customers and the tech community.Since the startup did not achieve any significant traction, I still learned a lot.KEY SKILLS OBTAINED- How to invalidate product idea in 2 weeks by performing CustDev with 10+ potential users.- Finance modeling with unit economics.- Fund raising for venture and dividend companies.- How to achieve a balanced scaling of sales, marketing and product initiatives.- Product management - targeting audience, value proposition and many more.RESPONSIBILITIES- Planning: set the studio's strategic direction, chose which product and technology to pursue.- Team Leadership: brought together a group of skilled people to work on new tech ideas.- Building minimal viable products.- Customer development.- Fund raising.PRODUCT AREAS- Automated systems for coworking spaces to improve efficiency.- A blockchain wallet made accessible through an account abstraction protocol.- Digital tokens for real-world assets, enabling trading on blockchain.- Enterprise blockchain solutions with private transactions and advanced cryptography.- AI tools designed to help developers work more efficiently.

Playdex is a rental NFT marketplace focused on web3 and gaming industry. The better inventory you have - more you earn. The easiest way to get good assets(NFTs) is to rent them on Playdex.I was a founding engineer. As the first engineer, I started with shaping product and alignment with business model. Then built the product, the team and set up processes.ACCOMPLISHMENTS- Created an innovative product on the competitive market.- Built stream-aligned product team or 7 people.- Achieved 100% accounting accuracy by implementing double-entry ledger system.- Trained the team on blockchain and web3 technologies.- Playdex raised $2M on seed round.RESPONSIBILITIES- Suggest lightweight processes that suits for an early stage company with remote employees.- Suggest tech stack and architecture that fit best for the product.- Enforced the best practices for software development: architecture, code quality, security, automation.- Participated in software development by building software and delivering product increments.- People management.- Reporting to the management team on progress and estimates.- Hiring. End-to-end hiring pipeline.- Project management: ensure ticket prioritization is in place; built roadmap.- Stakeholder expectation management.- Agile practices facilitation.

In addition to IT Infrastructure Leadership, I built a cross-functional development team.The team worked on different projects: payment gateway integrations; authentication and application security improvements.ACCOMPLISHMENTS- Implemented payment integrations with key partners: Google, Facebook, Western Union.- Scaled infrastructure to handle load generated by 20M active users.- Developed a team member into the team leader.- Introduced a cascading metric-based goal setting with OKRs framework.- Successfully addressed compliance regulation requirements, what allowed obtaining central bank license.- Suggested an idea and drove initiative of horizontal teams, in the result security and it ops horizontal teams are created.- Cut cost of infrastructure by 30% (tens of thousands of dollars).RESPONSIBILITIES- Strategy goal setting.- People management.- Project management.- Reporting on progress.- Stakeholder management.- Budget planning for team members and company-wide subscriptions.- Management of engineering processes.- Risk management for my area of responsibility.- Building a remote team engineering culture.

With a success in addressing high-load issues brought me to IT Infrastructure Leadership.As an IT Infrastructure Leader, I built an SRE(formerly DevOps) team and improved DORA metrics.ACCOMPLISHMENTS- Built a high-performing team.- Scaled infrastructure to handle load generated by 5M active users.- Migrated applications to Kubernetes.- Migrated all cloud resources in AWS under Terraform control.- Hired a superstar DBA.- Introduced incident management, what decreased incident frequency to 1 per month.- Set up bug bounty program what resulted in discovering of dozens security issues.- Reworked logging system to handle ever-growing volume of data.RESPONSIBILITIES- Leadership and technical vision for the IT Infra department.- People management.- Suggest and execute the IT Infrastructure technology strategy aligned to the company’s strategy.- Facilitate agile practices.- Evangelizing SRE and lean practices.- Planning and resource allocation.- Cross-team communication and coordination.- Increase security posture.- Database administration.- Coordinate penetration testing initiatives with security service companies.

Coins.ph is a financial services platform in the Philippines.I joined the startup at an early stage as a software engineer in the distributed team.Working in a startup usually means you're responsible for almost everything, starting from idea shaping to delivering value to customers with products you build.ACCOMPLISHMENTS- Decreased payment processing time for high-volume services from several minutes of manual work to seconds with an automated solution.- Created virtual card functionality, what offered online card payments to customers, resulted in company valuation increase by several $M.- Built prototypes for various payment providers to evaluate technical feasibility.- Increased backend scalability and deployment frequency by introducing Kubernetes proven by metrics.- Improved monitoring infrastructure, what opened easy way for developers to send and analyze application and business metrics.RESPONSIBILITIES- Build payment gateway integrations.- Do code reviews.- Develop internal tools and dashboard.- Performance optimizations: SQL query optimization, reworking code, architecture improvements.

In Mail.ru I joined an anti-spam team. The antispam system processes a high volume of email traffic.Some of the technical challenges the team faced with are: high load, big data, distributed systems, machine learning.As a Software Engineer, I was responsible for developing analytical systems and automation for the antispam operations team.ACCOMPLISHMENTS- Introduced high volume data stream processing with Kafka.- Improved SDLC and delivery pipeline by introducing GitLab.- Continuously mentor team mates on best practices by giving talks in internal conferences and workshops.- Reduced development cycles by introducing Apache Pig as a replacement for Hadoop Streaming for data-intense applications.RESPONSIBILITIES- Build data-intensive applications on top of the Hadoop ecosystem.- Develop internal tools and dashboard with modern web technologies.- Research big data tech trends and develop demo prototypes.- Evangelize DevOps practices.- Do code reviews.

During this time I had the privilege of working in various companies, improved programming skills, and mastered engineering practices in general.Aside from programming, I understood the importance of working thoroughly on software architecture and setting up the development process is crucial for success.Here's a shortlist of the journey:- Full-stack web development with Python/Django and JavaScript/jQuery.There were several projects on that stack.- The next major item was iOS development. Tech stack: Objective-C/Cocoa Touch.- Get to know with freelancing on UpWork(formerly oDesk).- Participate in a startup.It was the most intense period in terms of learning on errors. In the end, I get a deep view of how the software development industry works.All that boosted me on career development and professional advancement.