Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
Engineering leader and acquired-founder CTO. Today I architect the centralized enterprise payments platform at Events.com — multi-processor, PCI DSS SAQ A-EP, NestJS + Temporal.io on AWS EKS — following the December 2024 acquisition of Upped Events, the event-management platform I co-founded and led for nearly five years. At Upped Events I built the company from zero to acquisition: hired and led a 15-person engineering org, designed the technical platform (5 applications, a custom POS system with native Swift card-reader integration, full GitOps on AWS, ported to Azure in two weeks), and established the engineering culture that delivered for hundreds of events and tens of thousands of users. The platform's quality and scalability is what drove the acquisition. At Events.com I now own the unified payment platform — multi-processor adapter (Worldpay/Payrix, Stripe, Apple Pay), durable Temporal-orchestrated workflows for refunds, disputes, onboarding and reconciliation, a production double-entry ledger, and a 4-layer trust pipeline. I also drove the AI transformation of the engineering team — roughly 98% of the new payment platform was built via Claude Code in agentic workflows, converting the department into one that orchestrates AI agents alongside engineers. Before engineering: I served as CEO of a Macedonia hotel resort for nine years, taking it from 2,000 to 15,469 annual overnights and #1 on TripAdvisor, and before that I worked in commercial lending and AML compliance at a regional bank — implementing the AML framework that was later adopted sector-wide by central-bank order. Those operating years are why engineering at scale, regulatory rigor, and business-driven architecture all live in the same mental model for me. I care about: payments and platform architecture that survives regulatory scrutiny, building engineering organizations that ship fast without breaking trust, and the operating shift underway as AI agents become first-class members of engineering teams. MBA in Economics from the University of Ljubljana.
- Sole architect and primary developer of an enterprise-grade unified payment platform built on NestJS with Temporal.io for durable workflow orchestration. Supports multiple payment processors (Worldpay/Payrix, Stripe) via adapter pattern, with PCI DSS SAQ A-EP compliance, tokenization-based security, and a React management suite for disputes, merchant management, and reporting. - Architected and manage the AWS EKS cloud platform with full GitOps pipeline (FluxCD), infrastructure as code via Terraform/Terragrunt/Crossplane, SealedSecrets, and namespace-based tenant isolation. DevOps-as-a-self-service model with "principle of four eyes" security enforcement. - Led the re-deployment of Upped Events' POS system into Events.com's product suite, ensuring scalability, reliability, and compliance with global payment standards. - Led the technical integration of acquired companies into the Events.com platform, establishing repeatable integration patterns for future acquisitions. - Spearheaded AI transformation of the engineering team — converted the department into one that manages AI agents and "hive-minds," leading testing, experimentation, and knowledge-sharing to supercharge engineering velocity. - Currently managing 5 engineers and 1 QA engineer.
- Built an event management platform from zero to acquisition by Events.com (Dec 2024), serving hundreds of events and tens of thousands of users across ticket sales, CRM, attendee management, marketing, and staff management. - Hired, coached, and managed a 15-person engineering team. Established Agile development processes, containerized dev environments for rapid onboarding, and a culture of high code quality with linters enforcing cognitive complexity limits. - Architected a TypeScript/Node.js (ExpressJS) API-first platform with strict type safety, plus 2 Angular web apps and 2 Ionic hybrid mobile apps (Android + iOS). Wrote custom Capacitor plugins for native OS functionality including Swift-based card reader integration for iPad POS. - Developed a custom POS system deployable at live events for vendor sales — hybrid mobile app connected to card swipers and receipt printers. Processed high-volume transactions at major events. - Designed cloud infrastructure on AWS (EKS, RDS, ECR, DocumentDB, SNS, SES, CloudWatch). Later completed a full cloud migration from AWS to Azure (AKS, Cosmos DB, Azure MySQL) in just 2 weeks — enabled by Kubernetes portability. - Built a 3-level security architecture: (1) RBAC controlling UI elements and API routes per user role, (2) production environment isolation with data anonymization for non-prod, (3) production data access restricted to executive personnel only, all artifacts behind VPN. - Automated testing, documentation, and CI/CD deployment via GitHub Actions so the team could focus on business logic. Estimated and planned development for 22 distinct features across 5 applications.
- Orchestrated a complete technology upgrade of an old building that was not ready to serve modern guests, by installing and configuring new enterprise networking gear from Unifi and Mikrotik, video surveillance system from Unifi, VOIP system running on FreePBX and Grandstream gear and put together a POS system served by a custom designed server solution. Collaborated with an external partner to get the first optical connection to a remote mountain which resulted in opening new markets and culminating with the hosting of live streamed world cup events and becoming the default site for corporate events and team building for the booming IT services sector in Macedonia. - Built online presence from scratch, by creating a Drupal website. Built strong social media presence and connected other reservation platforms like Booking.com, Tripadvisor, Agoda. Got the hotel to no.1 traveler ranked accommodation provider on Tripadvisor out of 16 other facilities in the same town - Completed an image overhaul of an existing known brand with bad reputation, resulting in a successfully restarted business, which initially failed to find its market position during Macedonia’s transition towards free markets. It went from roughly 2,000 overnights to 15,469 overnights in 8 years, with stable team and client base, thriving in a new ecosystem of tourism service providers. The team grew from 11 to 30 employees in the same timespan with about 10 people employed seasonally - Facilitated cooperation between FAI and local government which resulted with Macedonia becoming part of the paragliding and hang-gliding world cups and couple of other national cups such as the British, Swiss, German - Hosted numerous high profile government events and VIPs, such as the president, prime minister and parliament speaker of Macedonia on multiple occasions, bringing name recognition across the tourism industry of Macedonia.
- Processing of large requests for commercial loans - Management of a commercial loan portfolio - Updating the procedures and calculations necessary for the approval of commercial loans - Maintaining and further development of relationships with existing key bank corporate customers
- Implemented an AML software solution - Developed a complete independent query system for the purposes of AML analysis - Worked on the establishment of procedures for the AML department - Oversight and audit of various bank departments and procedures for the purposes of AML compliance
- Analysis of major industries and scanning for profitable investments. - Analysis of merger and acquisition proposals. - Learning Bloomberg systems for the goals of analysis and portfolio management