Lead engineer who transforms startup MVPs into trustworthy platforms

Profile

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Occupation: Senior Software Engineer

Years of experience: 19 years

Based in: Sydney

Strengths: Platform engineering, Distributed systems, System architecture

Programming languages & frameworks: Java, Kotlin, Go, Scala, Python, Javascript, Typescript

👉 Full profile available on SkillsRobin

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Can you please introduce yourself?

I've been in the software industry for almost 20 years. I've worked in many different environments - from companies with 2-3 people to several thousand.

Initially I worked in consultancies doing large scale integration projects for different governmental and international organizations. After several projects I switched to work more in product companies. 

First I worked at a large, established, public company with headquarters in Silicon Valley, building the public API for their software as a service platform. After moving to Australia, I joined a successful scaleup which grew pretty quickly to a big size. 

After several years helping this organization grow, I decided to go back to working at small startups. Currently I'm working in the data space at a mid-sized startup working in the data engineering side of the business.

Earlier in my career, I mostly worked on backend components, architecture, distributed systems and reliability. Later I shifted towards doing more platform work - infrastructure, developer productivity tooling, data engineering and data platforms.

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What got you into software engineering?

I've always had a passion for computers since childhood. I did some school programming Olympiads and other stuff. At university I studied a mix between physics and IT. I did some research on the edge between physics and using IT tools for data analysis, image processing, analysing experimental data. It was sort of a natural move.

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What parts of software engineering do you like the most?

What I like the most is the stage after the very early MVP has been done - whether it's been done by contractors or using other approaches -  and you need to scale it and make it more reliably. 

Taking something that might have been made out of no-code tools or not the best engineering decisions and actually making it robust and scalable - building the foundation for future growth. That's where I think I have the most experience, but also what I enjoy the most. It might sound unusual, but I really like to clean up the mess other people made while moving very quickly.

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What makes you unique as a software engineer? What do you think your superpower is?

Definitely the wide range of different types of experiences I bring, especially in the area of building scalable, reliable, fault tolerant systems; designing architectures and working on complicated engineering problems.

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Can you tell me about a project in the past which you were very proud of?

To highlight what I meant about strengths - previously I joined a relatively early stage startup which had their system built mostly by part-time contractors. It was up and running and handling quite a lot of data with a few customers paying for it, but the system itself was quite fragile and not really scalable. 

My job was cleaning it up - Building the foundation for the system to grow further and scale without the disruption of major data losses or incidents. So migrating to proper technologies, improving the architecture, making it scalable and fault tolerant, unblocking and removing all the roadblocks. 

Sometimes it might be tricky because founders may not understand just how fragile something that they're trying to sell is, but when everything goes smoothly, that's what I enjoy.

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What kind of opportunity would you be excited about?

The most important thing is the human element. The relationship with the founders and with other people in the company - having genuinely good people around you and somebody who would support you and who you would support.

After all those big companies, currently I'm leaning towards working with smaller scale companies. It's much more fun. You have more opportunities to have an impact and influence growth. 

On top of that, also having the opportunity to grow myself and get some additional new experience. In my most recent moves over the last 2 or 3 years I've been working in the data space, so I would still be interested in working with data and bigger scale data tools. 

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Is there anything else that you think employers should hire you for? 

One more thing I wanted to mention - I like to mentor junior team members. I have some engagements with universities where I do tutoring and try to give students insights from the industry, help them prepare for when they actually get into the wild of software engineering. This aspect is especially valuable if startups have to hire more junior people. They need to create a more established environment where those engineers would actually grow and increase their skills and boost the company further while they grow. 

This is something that I really like to do - share my experience and help other engineers become better versions of themselves.

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Where do you see yourself in 10 years from now?

Difficult question, but obviously I would love to have the freedom to be a startup founder and try to build something meaningful from scratch, potentially in a CTO role or something like that. Maybe in the area of some technical field - developer tooling or something that would be targeted towards other engineers.

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What advice would you have for someone who was trying to hire a good developer, especially at the early stage?

The same person might really thrive in one environment and do really badly in another environment. The biggest goal is not to find the best engineer ever or the best person for the salary that you can pay them, but to find the person who's genuinely interested in being successful, who is interested, motivated and who would actually enjoy being in the environment that you have. 

The company environment and culture might be really hard to change. Everyone tries to build the best environment ever. But unfortunately, there's no such thing - all of them are different. So trying to find the person who actually fits into the environment that you're trying to build is the key.

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What's a fun fact about yourself that maybe not everyone would know?

I'm very bad at singing. But last year I found myself participating in a musical on stage.

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