Portuguese citizen, living in Porto. hi@pko.ch, +351 934 902 555, linkedin.com/in/pkoch.
Be sure to check my prose-like overview, if you prefer that. I also have a PDF version with it.
Managed a team of 7 engineers. Redesigned team's workflow to make all work known, discoverable, and its priority agreed upon by all stakeholders. Made the team's interface with the rest of the company simple and well-known, work planning went from closed-room black-box to 100% open and its trade-offs understood by everyone.
Modernized two decade-old Python codebases. Oversaw and implemented a lot of improvements, including refactorings, introduction of modern tooling (Poetry, mypy, pylint, flake8, pyupgrade, etc), moving to Python 3, implementing CD, establishing modern incident response practices, etc.
Managed a team of 7 engineers. Redesigned engineering's workflow by implementing Kanban across Product and Development and isolating interruptions into their own flow. This made developers be more than ticket-takers, neutralized distractions, and created a consistent delivery cadence.
Kept my hands dirty about 33% of the time. Designed and oversaw the implementation of a cross-microservice data system that empowered everyone to build custom real-time reports while safeguarding user data by enforcing column-level sensitivity labeling. Implemented both backend and frontend features. Regularly advised on infrastructure issues. Automated recurring engineering problems that didn’t fit in the roadmap (reports for vendors and partners, palliative measures, etc).
Acted as interim Chief Security Officer. Kept security standards well balanced, kept known threats catalogued, coordinated with other financial institutions, aligned incident response procedures with vendors. Implemented a cold storage system for crypto-asset stewardship.
Part of executive management. Used my position to reach out to unengaged or distressed employees in distant parts of the company to offer emotional support and mentoring. Finding myself less participative, I stepped down to encourage a more focused executive team.
Delivered the technical part of multiple crypto fundraising events. Coordinated security measures, negotiated customization scope, oversaw implementation and operation. These events had a high security profile (moving thousands of dollars and sensitive PII), uncertain traffic (anything from 0.1 to 100 req/s), and strict deadlines.
Oversaw a small team (2 engineers + 1 project manager). Implemented custom features (React/Redux, Rails, PostgreSQL) and led a redesign effort. Sourced, coordinated with, and integrated work from contractors. Enabled a microservices architecture by migrating from AWS Elastic Beanstalk to ECS. Reformulated networking, logs, alarms, etc.
Part of executive management where, together with other managers, I set direction and strategy for the company.
Looking to explore a different way of doing engineering management, I co-founded a company focused on maximizing happiness, openness, and skill. We built a high-talent small software agency (of 6 engineers and 1 admin).
Managed all 6 engineers and did development work. A representative sample would be:
- Built multiple React/Redux frontends and respective Rails or Phoenix backends
- Designed and built a WordPress plugin to sync entries from a no-code tool to blog posts
- Built Rails app for ALS patient prognosis, with HIPAA-compliant infra, codified using Terraform and SaltStack
- Incident support: some clients called us saying "this website is on fire, can you join this call and help us fix it?"
- Built a baccarat game using Ethereum and state channels, with a web frontend
Fractal became our largest client and invited us to be acquihired, which we accepted.
Full-stack development on Yelp's business owner features across a diverse technology stack (custom JavaScript framework, monolithic Python app, multiple microservices, Mesos, MySQL, Kafka, many AWS services, etc). Contributed to modernizing infra, performance, logging, monitoring, and automated error recovery.
Lead a small team (3 people) that designed and implemented Yelp Preview, which let you preview a business owner's back-office, powering thousands of sales pitches per day. Due to its architectural planning, it required only a few tens of engineering hours in maintenance since its introduction.
Helped trailblaze the introduction of Kafka company-wide, migrating two microservices to use it. Helped shape the packages that became company standard.
Worked on the Yelp Transaction Platform, an online ordering brokerage system. Implemented monitoring on our partners' conversion performance, improved on-call tools and procedures, and established cross-system error monitoring. These made debugging issues near-instantaneous, drastically reducing on-call stress and errors, and recovering ~$10k revenue on a daily basis.
Spontaneously took ownership of legacy systems' issues, including subsystem re-writes that spanned several quarters. Many contributions to infra and release tools, from a 90% reduction in dropped connections during some deployments to test failure triage automation (going from 5 painful minutes of ticket hunting to 1 CLI call).
Older history is on another page.
- Certified Scrum Master
- Masters in Software Engineering at Faculdade de Engenharia, Universidade de Porto