Hi! I'm Karol, CTO and co-founder of Smily, a Ruby on Rails expert and distributed systems architect, .
Thanks to over 10 years of experience, working on difficult challenges and being committed to learning new things every day and reading all books I can find on the relevant topics, I had a chance to solve a variety of problems. Here are some notable initiatives I've had a chance to lead:
- Grow engineering team from 5 to over 20 team members with scarce finances
- Manage ecosystem of 27 distributed applications (and several Ember applications)
- 350x improvement in data synchronization speed between services by replacing HTTP API-based data synchronization between services with Kafka-based Change Data Capture using a custom framework decreasing the average latency of data synchronization between services from over 30 minutes to sub-5 seconds (over 350x improvement), at the same using less than 30% resources (CPU, memory) on the consumers side compared to the previous architecture
- Introduce event-based architecture and communication between services via RabbitMQ using a custom framework
- Build PCI DSS compliant platform for credit data processing and maintain compliance through multiple years
- Migrate from legacy Hephy Workflow PaaS and self-hosted Kubernetes to a modern infra built on top of AWS EKS, Helm, ArgoCD, Jenkins
- Migrate 5 self-managed PostgreSQL clusters to AWS RDS service using AWS DMS
- Migrate 3 self-managed Redis cluster to AWS ElasiCache
- Decrease AWS infrastructure cost by approximately 35% through different initiatives (including the migrations mentioned above)
- Introduce SPACE Framework as a developer productivity framework
My CTO archetype is an architect - while I've been also a de-facto VP of Engineering focusing on people management, I'm at my best when I design systems and keep my hands at least a little dirty, even if it's just a prototype or a proof of concept.
I strongly believe in always giving back. That's why I've been involed in many open source projects and have been sharing knowledge on multiple occasions (including writing a book and releasing it for free and writing articles on other blogs.).
If you need a consulting in any areas of my expertise, feel free to use the form below and send me a message.