Profile — Julian Sirakov, Engineering Lead

About Me

Full Name:Julian Sirakov
Phone:+359 887 242 014
Email:julian.sirakov@gmail.com
Website:www.juliansirakov.com
Address:Flora 1, Flora Park, 1000 Sofia, Bulgaria

Engineering Leader with strong focus on technology, open mind, energetic and with genuine curiosity.

I enjoy working with people, building teams and taking on challenging tasks.

I have plenty of experience working with teams that specialized on different layers of the software architecture (UI, Backend, Infrastructure) as well as end-to-end functional domains (Finance, Payments) and with wide variety of technologies (Java, Python, Go, Javascript/Web technologies, K8S, Virtualization and many more)

Building teams from scratch is great, but taking an existing team to the next level is a challenge you must try to make your experience complete! There are no weak teams - just leaders who are not taking responsibility.

My Resume

Work Experience
Senior Manager R&D

Halo Diagnostics Oct 2020 - Current

Building innovative software for medical diagnostics to improve human health and well being.

Check Halo Diagnostics site Halo Diagnostics for details on our mission and current opportunities!
Director Engineering

Mirantis Inc (through Docker Inc Acquisition) - Dec 2019 - July 2020

Lead the team through the integration phase in Mirantis.
Director Engineering

Docker Inc - June 2019 - Dec 2019

I was responsible for building a team from scratch in Sofia, Bulgaria as well as leading 2 teams (Docker Hub, roughly 12 engineers, and Docker DTR, 6 engineers) remotely.

The Sofia site onboarded a variety of roles - UX designers, QA automation engineers, Infrastructure engineers and even Security engineers.

In the short time so far we managed to ramp up a team in Sofia (hired 10 engineers) and successfully deliver a brand new feature - add 2FA auth for Docker Hub
Senior Manager - Platform Services & Infrastructure
Paysafe LLC - June 2017 - May 2019 (2 years)

As Platform Services & Infrastructure Manager I was responsible for building high performance teams, improve engineering teams performance and provide efficient platform for stable and robust business service execution. I lead 4 teams (1 remote) in the areas of Shared Services, Platform and IaaS.

I was responsible for the delivery of high quality PaaS and SDLC tools to dev teams (including containerization effort - produce Docker images per micro-service and use K8S as target IaaS)

Also as part of my activities as leader I organized the first internal hackathon which inspired 30% of the IT workforce (50 engineers) grouped in 12 teams to participate. As result - we have 2 new features implemented, 2 prototypes in the backlog ready for development and a number of wild ideas that just made use of new technology.
Site Lead & Engineering Manager

Uber Inc - April 2014 - April 2017 (3 years)

Lead the growth of the team from start to 25+. Managed to onboard 2 managers and 20+ engineers.

As Eng Manager - I was responsible for a number of services and domains related to Partner Money management and Tax & Compliance. The domains involved a mix of trip scale functionalities and partner scale functionalities. The site had full ownership and responsibility over all domain areas that we owned.
Sr. Engineering Manager
VMware Inc - October 2007 - April 2014 (7 years)

Responsibilities:

* Project management: Delivering the User Interfaces for many features across the vSphere platform. As part of the management team I was directly responsible for the successful delivery of the features interface with the clients and the usability. To achieve this I guided my team to find the best solutions that can be delivered in the timeframe. I was directly responsible for managing the team through all phases: from requirements gathering, through architecting the solution, to building realistic plans, through execution, risk management, change management and quality control. As part of my duties I was also responsible for the QA team - planning and execution.

* People management/ Team development I was responsible for managing from 10 to 20+ engineers directly and at times for 40+ engineers indirectly working on a single project. Career development, coaching, leading through change, motivation I was able to hire 20+ engineers to the team and onboard them to become high quality and high value contributors.

* Achievements: - Managed the biggest iteration for switching the technology of the vSphereManagement Interface from C# desktop application to Java/Flex Web application. A multi-year multi-location cross functional effort that lead to successful delivery in 2013. - Presented vSphere Web Client on VMworld US 2012

* Processes: Waterfall, Scrum

* Technologies and tools: - vSphere Web Client: Java, Flex, OSGI, BlazeDS, Selenium, Virgo, Tomcat, Sonar, Maven, Perforce, Bugzilla, Microsoft Project, Eclipse - vSphere Client: C#
Engineer through Sr. Egnineer / Team Lead
Sciant AG (former Wizcom) - March 2003 - September 2007 (4 years)

Various engineering tasks and projects

Design specs, Delivery, team leading, task management, mentorship of Junior Engineers