Resume

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Contact

I prefer contact via email: hello@gwitek.com

Alternatively you can send me a message on LinkedIn

Profile

I have 15 years of experience in tech industry, including 7 years as a manager. I specialize in building successful, diverse, productive teams. I write code, I speak at conferences, I mentor and coach developers. I’ve worked in multiple industries including travel, fintech and cybersecurity. My current goal is to improve the state of engineering management in the tech industry.

Experience

Aug 2021 - currently: Booking.com (Netherlands)

Aug 2022 - currently: Senior Engineering Manager

  • Led a group of 3 engineering managers and 15 engineers in platform engineering department
  • Oversaw areas like Internal Developer Portal, incident response, secrets management, engineering excellence, and site reliability
  • Led contract negotiations with multiple vendors, resulting in multi-million dollar agreements
  • Co-created internal career framework for engineering managers
  • Worked closely with SREs across the company to improve incident response and post mortem processes
  • Reduced time to create new internal UIs from months to days by introducing a new Internal Developer Portal
  • Overhauled internal software catalog consisting of more than 10,000 software components
  • Supported growth of managers and individual contributors, led multiple successful promotion cases

Aug 2021 - Jul 2022: Engineering Manager

  • Led an engineering team responsible for building tools supporting site reliability
  • Introduced a company-wide on-call policy, onboarded 3,000+ engineers across multiple countries
  • Improved team processes, reduced technical debt, and increased team productivity

Oct 2020 - July 2021 : Engineering Manager at EclecticIQ (Netherlands)

  • Led a cross-functional team of 10 members, including developers, testers, and technical writers
  • Led development of Threat Intelligence platform used by companies and governments across the world
  • Overhauled team processes, including 1-1s, capacity planning, and retrospectives, to enhance productivity
  • Guided the team through a challenging period marked by resignations, leadership uncertainty, and low customer satisfaction

Sep 2019 — Sep 2020: Manager of Software Development at Diligent (Netherlands)

  • Led two hybrid teams, with 11 direct reports
  • Introduced modern software development practices: reduced the release cycle from 3 months to 1 week, increased test coverage, improved code quality with regular code reviews
  • Established regular 1-1s and set personal objectives for team members
  • Delivered multiple features supporting corporate governance platform

Nov 2014 - Nov 2018 Ascenda (Singapore)

Jul 2017 - Nov 2018: Head of Engineering

  • Designed and led implementation of a multi-tenant travel platform in Ruby and JavaScript
  • Built a robust and scalable hotel search engine using Elixir
  • Integrated 100+ APIs: hotel providers, payments, loyalty programs of airlines and banks
  • Developed two open source Ruby gems to streamline the management of business logic and multi-tenant configuration

Nov 2014 - July 2017: Lead Developer

  • Designed and led implementation of a multi-tenant travel platform in Ruby and JavaScript
  • Built a robust and scalable hotel search engine using Elixir
  • Integrated 100+ APIs: hotel providers, payments, loyalty programs of airlines and banks
  • Developed two open source Ruby gems to streamline the management of business logic and multi-tenant configuration

Sep 2009 - Jan 2015: Full-Stack Developer at multiple companies

  • Built multiple client projects using Ruby on Rails, Backbone.js and AngularJS
  • Worked with customers across multiple timezones ranging from Europe to New Zealand
  • Optimized ad serving engine to handle up to 300,000 requests/minute
  • Led implementation of advertiser self-service panel for an adtech company
  • Worked closely with product managers to support data-driven decisions
  • Built an international money transfer platform for students
  • Worked on service oriented architecture, supported by libraries like AMQP and by a custom single sign-on solution
  • Led workshops for students and organized student internships

Education

  • Poznan University of Technology - BSc in Computer Science, 2007 — 2011
  • Poznan University of Technology - MSc in Computer Science, 2011 — 2012

Technical skills

  • Back-end development with Ruby, Elixir, Scala, Python, Node.js, PHP
  • Front-end development with TypeScript, Angular, Vue.js, React.js
  • Proficiency with both SQL and NoSQL databases
  • Experience with multiple AWS services
  • Experience with heavy-traffic, scalable applications, service oriented architecture
  • Basic familiarity with machine learning, Kubernetes, Hashicorp tools

Others

  • I occasionally contribute to open source projects. I used to maintain Sorcery, a popular authentication library.
  • I spoke at several technical conferences, including EuRuKo (European Ruby Conference), WebExpo Prague, RedDotRuby in Singapore, RubyConf Taiwan as well as Codemotion Berlin.
  • I used to co-organise local meetups for Ruby Developers in Poland and Singapore, as well as meetups for Elixir and Erlang developers in Singapore.
  • I volunteered as a programming coach in Singapore, Poland and Spain.
  • I speak Polish (native), English (very fluent) and Spanish (conversational). Currently I study Dutch.