Israel
I have been leading R&D groups for over 15 years; building SaaS, micro-services, cloud-native, and big-data products at massive scale (billions of messages per day); restructuring, scaling and cultivating high-performing R&D groups. I help organizations step out of chaos and navigate complex transitions—whether that means turning around a struggling product, fixing broken workflows, or simply helping build healthier, more focused engineering teams that deliver reliably. As an R&D executive and former startup co-founder, I also know how to build from the ground up, having designed and built, or re-built, four cloud-native, big-data SaaS products from their initial concept to scalable, revenue-generating production, in one case leading to the company's acquisition. As a manager, I aim to balance execution with an empathetic approach to leadership. I care about mentoring, growing talent, and handling conflicts constructively, while remaining practical about our deliverables. This approach allows me to effectively lead and scale mid-to-large engineering groups, ensuring they operate as healthy, well-organized teams driven to ship reliable products.
Architectural Turnaround: Led the complete redesign of a tightly coupled, legacy big-data system that was suffering from latency, stability issues, and prohibitive infrastructure costs. Transitioned the platform to a distributed, serverless architecture utilizing data lakes, columnar databases, and modern ETL pipelines. Scale & Performance Impact: Resolved systemic bottlenecks that caused the platform to struggle at 1.5 billion daily events. The redesigned system now runs smoothly at over 4 billion daily events, while simultaneously extending data retention periods and reducing overall operational costs. Engineering Leadership: Led a thorough restructuring of a ~20-person R&D department to improve execution and delivery. Mentored team leaders, recruited key talent, and implemented new processes and methodologies that brought transparency and predictability to planning, quality, and execution. Technology Stack: AWS (S3, Lambda, StepFunctions, SQS/SNS, Athena, Redshift, CloudFront), OpenSearch, Redis, MongoDB, RDS Postgres, MySQL, QuickSight, Kubernetes, Docker, Jenkins, Prometheus, Grafana. Languages: TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, PHP. AI Stack: Claude Code, Github Copilot, Warp.
SaaS & Architectural Transformation: Led the strategic transition from a legacy on-premise product to a cloud-native SaaS solution on AWS. Designed an event-driven microservices architecture (hundreds of REST APIs) and modernized the engineering culture with CI and automated testing, significantly improving system scalability and high availability. Organizational Scaling & Process Maturity: Tripled the R&D department (10 to 30 engineers) and restructured the flat organization into specialized teams (Server, Client, QA, DevOps). Recruited, mentored, and trained new engineering managers. Established standardized procedures (spec reviews, UAT) and introduced data-driven ROI frameworks to improve productivity and quality. Technology Stack: AWS, Microservices, Event-Driven (Camel, RabbitMQ), REST APIs, React, Redux, Java, Jenkins, Selenium, Java/JS Unit Testing, New Relic.
Following the acquisition of the company, and after the acquisition of my start-up (3 years later), I returned to Bluesnap as VP R&D of ~30 engineers.
From Product Conception to Exit: Co-founded and developed a B2B SaaS platform that automated and streamlined the planning, execution, and analysis of digital marketing campaigns. Actively participated in seed fundraising efforts. The technology was acquired by Algomizer Ltd. http://www.calcalist.co.il/internet/articles/0,7340,L-3621954,00.html
Strategic Overhaul & Catalyst for Acquisition: As a team leader, led a complete rewrite of the core e-commerce product. Enabled API-only solutions that successfully opened new revenue streams with B2B clients. This served as a critical growth milestone, ultimately leading to the company's acquisition by Boston-based private equity firm Great Hill Partners. Technology Stack: Modular Monolith / Decoupled Layers, REST APIs, Java, Spring (IoC, AOP, MVC), Hibernate (ORM), Continuous Integration, Unit Testing.