Leading the formation of a central observability team.

- Upgraded visualization system of the internal monitoring tool (Grafana) used by most Zalando employees. This prevented security issues, enabled new visualization functionality, and made future upgrades simple. This involved rewriting in-house plugins from Angular to React, further changes to the related tools, and collaboration with Zalando engineers to prevent or proactively fix any issues.- Prepared internal monitoring tool for yearly growth, especially around Cyber Week, by identifying performance bottlenecks in the ingestion, query, visualization, and storage layers. No major Cyber Week incidents were encountered during my tenure.- Replaced the metrics storage from an in-house to a vendor. Involved multiple vendor evaluations, load testing, and query conversion layer to support all existing dashboards. No major impact was inflicted on thousands of existing dashboards, while costs were reduced and the team was able to shift its operational capacity to innovation.

- Lead the 10+ developer team across Canada, US, Russia to provide payments solutions to all game studios and partner teams at Zynga- Mentor and level up team members- Oversee all hiring for the team

- Design and implement a new service that is a cornerstone of social functionality in the latest FarmVille game- Write numerous tech specs, actively participate in many of department's code reviews- Mentor junior engineers

- Migrate an internal service written in Scala from ElasticSearch to MySQL, from custom cloud to AWS. Together with other performance improvements, this allowed the service to reduce operational complexity (15 compute resources down to 5), substantial cloud cost reduction (more than 3x) and elimination of maintenance costs (from frequent pages/alerts to zero).- Optimize performance of internal service management tool used by many Zynga employees. Front end performance improved 10x.- Add and deploy features and bug fixes to numerous other services used by games like Farmville, Poker and Words with Friends- Rewrite internal C library to support UTF-8 character set, add test coverage

Developed a wide range of internal services:- developed a payment service to offload various provider integration from games. This has allowed for faster new provider integration- built an offline notification system to allow games to send Apple, Android, Blackberry and Facebook notifications to a subset of users in a scalable way- a total of more than a dozen services have been build. Services were scaled on an individual basis and iterated over independently from games.Led internal services and ops team- achieve a track record of quarter goal completion while assisting other teams with their work- successfully introduce Atlassian-inspired ShipIt days every second Friday to allow for innovation to come from within the team

Employed various techniques to find and eliminate bottlenecks in existing Rails apps:- add a layer of caching to frequent slow queries- add a load-balancer of front-end web servers and- improve MySQL indices, and in some cases rewrite queries. Replace low cardinality indices with composite indices. Replace naive slow queries with a few simple queries.- use MEMORY engine for storing and querying temporary dataThese and other improvements allowed an app that has reached its limit to scale potentially infinitely.Architected a number of infrastructure pieces, such as log management system. Anyone in the company is able to query it in real time, or perform complex Big Data-type operations (leveraging Elastic Map Reduce). The architecture has also allowed us to try different solutions like Vertica and Amazon Redshift.

- Built on internal app for Telus. It included a lottery system that incentivized salespeople to increase their sales- Added store locator to Sleep Country Canada's website, which used Google Maps API- Worked on internal project that allowed us to create simple marketing websites with zero development time- Worked on a two-people team to build Unroole, a CMS system for complex marketing websites. Added a powerful time-based versioning system (e.g. for Christmas promotions), an asset management system, support for complex tree navigation structure, and many others features.- Worked on a proofs of concept for easy to use drag-and-drop interface for the CMS system that became a core feature. It included dozens of fully-customizable widgets that allowed anyone to create very unique websites.