Summary
Engineering Manager leading two teams (10 engineers) reporting to the CTO at Newsela, an edtech platform serving millions of K-12 students and teachers. Shipping AI-powered features that reached top-tier adoption within weeks. Track record of delivering cross-org initiatives spanning 6+ teams without dedicated program management. Currently driving spec-driven development across the engineering org - an AI-native methodology compressing requirements-to-implementation, with early results showing ~50% faster ticket completion.
Key Achievements
- Led LLM-powered feature delivery (OpenAI, Gemini) that reached the platform's highest adoption tier within weeks of launch - zero PII sent to external models, with a novel content evaluation framework built from scratch
- Consolidated ~12 microservices into a single monolith with zero production incidents; transformed a system with zero observability into a fully monitored platform (Datadog dashboards, alerts, on-call rotation)
- Coordinated cross-org initiative spanning 6+ teams with no dedicated project team - secured a major district renewal (direct revenue impact) and set architecture precedent for future content types
- Drove spec-driven development adoption across product and engineering, securing buy-in from senior product leadership - versioned specs as single source of truth, consumable by LLM coding agents
- Developed IC into Tech Lead through epic captain model; engineer later promoted to lead another team
Experience
Newsela
Engineering Manager
People & Team Building:
- Built culture of team-driven innovation: engineers independently replaced vendor TTS system (AWS Polly) with open-source solution (Coqui TTS), expanding language support and reducing costs - came from the team, not the roadmap
- Currently managing dual EM + interim TL responsibilities during leadership transition while maintaining delivery velocity
- Addressed performance gaps through structured, multi-month feedback processes with documented expectations and clear outcomes
- Developed IC into interim Tech Lead through epic captain model; engineer later promoted to lead another team
Product & Strategy:
- Co-led product discovery at story mapping stage for every major initiative - defined success criteria and measurement plans before engineering work began
- Led delivery of LLM-powered graphic organizers that became one of the platform's most-used features within weeks - zero PII exposure, novel evaluation process
- Led technical planning for Generation Genius video integration (1,000+ videos) - coordinated across product, engineering, content, and the acquired company's team to ship on time for Back to School
- Established experimentation culture: teams now propose segmentation strategies and run controlled rollouts to validate impact
Technical Leadership:
- Led consolidation of ~12 microservices into a single monolith - zero production incidents, from zero observability to comprehensive monitoring
- Drove Writing platform migration using strangler pattern - maintained production stability for millions of users through Back to School launch
- Resolved critical data integrity escalation, then transformed the response into lasting infrastructure: daily health instrumentation, threshold-based alerting, overhauled on-call processes
- Introduced central spec repository where product commits requirements as PRs - architecture decisions and data models are versioned artifacts enabling AI-assisted implementation
Tech Lead
- Designed content visibility system V2 architecture - replaced tens of thousands of individual content IDs per user with a handful of set slugs; described internally as "one of the biggest projects in company history"
- Created phased TRD framework for Generation Genius integration (12 revisions with stakeholders); adopted org-wide as the reference model for cross-team planning
- Shipped a differentiated instruction feature and content visibility V2 on the same day - both on time, zero critical bugs during 5-week experiment period with 40% of paid users
- Drove domain language standardization across platform and BI teams - eliminated recurring cross-team confusion and enabled consistent analytics
Senior Software Engineer
- Built platform API integrations (LTI, Google Classroom, Canvas, Schoology, Clever) enabling SSO and roster sync for tens of thousands of teachers
- Promoted through three levels in four years (Software Engineer to Senior to Tech Lead)
Software Engineer
Immersion
- Designed automated blue-green deployment pipeline (Terraform, Python) replacing fully manual EC2 process
SoftServe (contractor for Amplify)
- Full-stack engineer on Amplify's education platform (Python, JavaScript, Java, MongoDB, MySQL) with CI/CD and AWS infrastructure
Education
- M.S. Computer Science - United States
- M.S. Applied Mathematics / Automation Engineering - Ukraine
Technical Skills
- Languages
- Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, SQL
- Frameworks
- Django, Flask, FastAPI, React, Next.js
- AI/ML
- LLM integration (OpenAI, Gemini), prompt engineering, LangFuse, evaluation frameworks
- Infrastructure
- AWS, CI/CD, Docker, Terraform, Datadog, monitoring/observability
- Data
- PostgreSQL, MongoDB, MySQL, data modeling, API design
- Process
- Spec-driven development, domain-driven design, TDD, Scrum, cross-functional coordination