Mr. Michalik works with international teams to lead, inspire, and influence Executive Leadership, Engineering, Product Management, and Project Management for delivery of new products and awesome technical solutions. He’s run his own successful startup, worked as a consultant for 50+ top-tier organizations, coordinated teams around the globe, and launched new products. He’s served as Founder, CEO, VP, General Manager, Director, Product Manager, Project Manager, Architect, Development Manager, and Software Engineer with a proven track record as an individual contributor, direct manager, and a manager of managers. Andrew combines strategic perspective, global competence, and business acumen with a collaborative management style to effectively lead cross-functional teams while gracefully navigating remote and multi-cultural international environments. Connect to me via LinkedIn, Github, @ajmichalik.bsky.social, Family Insta, or Download my Resume

Experience

The Lisbon MBA | Portugal
MBA Candidate at The Lisbon MBA Católica | Nova

I am excited to have this chance to strengthen my business knowledge as a 2021-23 Candidate for The Lisbon MBA. Later this year I will be exploring opportunities that complement my technical and business background at the C-level or part-time at the Advisor, Investor, or Board level. Private Equity and Venture Capital roles are a plus.
Executive MBA, class of 2023. (2021 – Present)

Defined.AI | Lisbon, Portugal
GM & VP Engineering | Translation & QoE Business Verticals | Shared Services | Your Source for AI Training Data
General Manager (GM) for Translation and Quality of Experience Business Verticals. VP of Engineering for five shared services: Self-Service, Tech Support, Agile Coaches, Global IT, and Cybersecurity, leading fully remote 100+ direct and indirect reports.

Led Engineering plus Product and Project Management for the Translation Business Vertical, including acquisition, APIs, data quality tools, design, integration tools design, payment platform, and client management. Built specialized language datasets to enable multilingual machine translation engines for state-of-the-art chatbots and voice assistants. Provided bilingual Machine Translation data services at xxMM+ words/month with hundreds of language pairs. Reduced Translation manual operations by 85% with improved accuracy & fluency by ~20%.

Led Engineering, Product, and Project Management for the Quality of Experience Business Vertical. Defined API’s & UI’s for client diversity, scaling, role creation, and vendor management. Improved job input throughput by 8x with faster uploads and processing capacity. Formed a multi-disciplinary task force to recover a launch failure with a major client to deliver Project Management API’s with ~80% faster development over previous releases.

VP of Engineering for Cross-Workflow services, APIs, product design, and development for reporting, integration tools, and execution processes to improve service stability, scaling, and security. Guided internal Technical Support for first level issue triage. Drove reports improvements in speed, business value, and metrics. Improved system stability for multiple services, reducing the number of Technical Support tickets. Grew the Agile Coaching team to improve Scrum best practices and developing a strong Agile environment for predictable deliverables and increased cross-team collaboration. Engineering leader for Global IT and Cybersecurity handling personal, office, software, service, plus network operations and strategy.
Managed remote teams in Portugal & Seattle. (2020 – 2021)

Nubank.com.br | São Paulo, Brazil
Vice President Engineering | Consumer & Merchant Verticals | Fintech $25B+ Decacorn
As VP of Engineering, Consumer & Merchant Verticals, lead 100+ direct and indirect reports for Nubank, the highest valued ($25B+) digital bank in the world. Partnering with Engineering , People & Culture, and Executive Leadership, achieved four crucial goals:

• Hire aggressively: Grew the Engineering team from 150 to 450+. Engaged in over a dozen senior hires across the organisation beyond engineering.
• Launch Internationally: Supported team (psychological safety, professional, tactical) for Mexico go-live and growth.
• Maintain healthy teams through 1:1’s, engagement surveys, and skip levels. Strengthen the CTO’s team, including our first female VP, a VP for Argentina, and new Chief Information Security Officer.
• No tragedies as Nubank transitioned from Brazil-only Unicorn ($1B) to an international Decacorn ($25B+).

Transitioned into new role leading a 100+ Engineering team for consumer and merchant facing verticals after facilitating an Engineering reorganization. Changes went smoothly and were well-accepted. New specific teams include:

• Credit / Debit Card Authorizer, Bill & Payments, Chargeback
• Core Credit, including Credit Strategy, Engagement, & Heavy Spenders, plus Lending
• Customer Service Platforms to improve customer-facing operational efficiency while providing a great experience.
• Launching new teams, including Technical Writers & Technical Program Management (TPM) Team.

Previously, as Vice President Engineering | Security, Platforms, Operations

After an extensive search, hired as the first VP of Engineering to partner with the founding CTO in leading the company’s engineering team and coordinate with the entire Executive Leadership Team. The scope of impact is all of technology, globally, for Nubank. Specific teams include:

• Security, including InfoSec Red/Blue Teams, auditing, physical security and IT for Onboarding, and remote office tools.
• Engineering Platforms – Zookeeper, AWS resources, Kafka, DB’s & sharding, Business Engineering metrics. Stack includes Clojure, CI/CD into AWS, Datomic & DynamoDB, Prometheus & Splunk.
• Customer Service Platforms to improve customer-facing operational efficiency while providing a great experience.
• International – Establish and support international operations with Headquarters Engineering (Brazil), Berlin, Mexico City, while expanding hiring and enablement of internationally remote team members.
• People & Culture – Build tools to help grow our teams and strengthen our hiring and internal recruitment.

Managed teams in Brazil & Mexico. (2018 – 2020)

Grab.com | Singapore, Southeast Asia
Head of Engineering, Systems & Security Security | SEA $40B+ Decacorn
As Head of Engineering, Systems & Security, led 90+ direct and indirect reports with strong decision-making skills and an understanding of where infrastructure, security, and support fit into the overall organizational growth & strategy. Proven track record of hiring, managing, and working with multidisciplinary teams and mentoring talent. Managed a global geographically distributed team across eight countries. Owned architecture, security, DevOps, & infrastructure best practices, processes, metrics, and engineering. Primary driver, educator, and steward of high quality and reliable engineering. Guided strategic M&A technology investments including due diligence to align with business needs.

Chaired weekly Operation Excellence meetings to drive stability & reliability with deployment processes including canary deployments and deprecating systems out of critical path. Scaled the SysOps, Security, and Support teams while growing management bench strength. Continuously improved on-call processes and procedures capturing tribal knowledge with wikis and team member rotation strategies. Instituted a Total Quality Management process to improve our tracking and remediation of bugs in the field, including a cross-team weekly “Ship Room” feature review and tracking open known issues after product release. Early in tenure deprecated a legacy system that had been under consideration for almost 2 years by structuring it as a 3-month plan in order to keep attention focused on the project. Successfully negotiated SLA freezes with Product Management and country leads, and reduced management resistance upon recognition of improved quality and stability. Managed $xxMM OpEx budgets & contracts with AWS & Google cloud providers while simultaneously rightsizing and scaling operations at tremendous growth rates and improving to 99.97% availability.

Managed teams in Singapore, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. (2017 – 2018)

VINFO Inc | Southeast Asia
Contract CTO | Senior Technology Consultant | Multiple $xxM Funded Startups
Contract CTO for fast growing eCommerce, EdTech, Training, Manufacturing, and Digital Marketing startups and established corporations in Southeast Asia serving international markets.

Providing consulting services to regional startups and enterprise organizations with international development centers. Contributing highly technical competence, strong written English and verbal communication skills, plus management know-how to Southeast Asia and the EU multinationals. Consulting as a Senior/Executive Level Manager with both startup experience and a leadership background from major U.S. corporations. Dedicated to guiding emerging businesses and managing locally for established organizations with an international perspective.

◆ Coordinate corporate IT solutions (CRM, accounting, marketing systems, and reporting tools) plus front office digital media (internal websites and e-commerce portals).
◆ Guide IT teams based in SouthEast Asia plus remote teams in multiple continents.
◆ Recruit and coach employees.
◆ Plan, organize, and control IT and digital operations at a global level.
◆ Ensure security and reliability of electronic transactions.
◆ Pro-actively automate processes that can be streamlined with IT solutions.
◆ Identify problematic areas and implement strategic solutions.
◆ Handle annual budget and ensure cost effectiveness.

Recent client technologies include: Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 & RDS MySQL, Go Language / golang, Docker, Microservice Architecture.

Developing with Java, PHP, Drupal, WordPress, OptimizePress, OAP (Office Ontraport CRM), Konnektive, Git / GitHub, Atlassian Suite / BitBucket.

Working with teams across Malaysia (TrustedCompany, Kubiq), Pakistan (Ozoqo Technologies), Indonesia, India, Thailand, and Singapore. (2016 – 2017)

Rackspace Cloud | San Francisco, California
Director of Software Development / SFO General Manager
Led 30+ Senior Managers, Managers, & Principal Engineers for Cloud Computing IaaS / SaaS offerings including Auto Scaling, Monitoring, Metrics, Monitoring Intelligence Dashboard, and Mobile Apps, plus SFO Site Operations. Stabilized and normalized teams from a product, personnel, and performance standards perspective; built passion around Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), internal process improvement, and best practices. Mentored individual contributors and transitioned leaders into and out of new positions with more appropriate responsibilities. Engaged teams at standup, sprint & product planning, plus coding & design review sessions; monitored PR’s (closed & open-source) to track software development and DevOps automation. Partnered with Product Management on product strategy and product roadmaps, and with Senior VP Leadership to drive credible long term strategic direction. Rebuilt and streamlined the recruitment pipeline to aggressively on-board open positions.

Drove metrics adoption across the organization to improve SFO & upstream systems. Initiated consistent use of metrics dashboards to drive improved SLAs and system reliability through weekly Operational Reviews. One key system achieved a 100x success rate improvement with a 10x user growth, and was acknowledged by the CTO at a company-wide event. Launched a Monitoring dashboard and delivered 230% yr/yr growth. Drove frontend user experience (UX) redesign with improved graphics, bootstrap CSS, suppressions, backend sister-system integration, and one-click alarm configuration leading to a 20% positive increase within a month of launch. Achieved 6x usage increase for Monitoring Metrics to 8M metrics/min from +200K servers feeding 10x growth of a 5PB big data analytics platform, and soft-launched a new Kafka based architecture for future 10x scalability. Technologies: Java, Node.js, Python, OpenStack, Cassandra, Kafka, Hadoop, Git/GItHub, Jenkins Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD), Chef. (2013 – 2016)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) | Seattle, Washington
Software Development Manager
Led 12+ engineers as direct and indirect reports in developing tools for security monitoring, software inventory, system health status, visualization, fleet-wide upgrades, and testing of fleet software. Product development included a software deployment system handling millions of AWS software upgrades every day, a software Inventory system for cloud instances, and a generalized software testing framework providing QA and stress analysis for EC2 platforms and AWS software. Created and articulated a broader vision for the team within AWS, with emphasis on safety and fleet health. Stabilized, rebuilt (tripled), and inspired the team with a singular focus on software engineering excellence.

Instituted and led the AWS EC2-wide Change Control Board for governance, compliance, and release management of all server deployments. Over a six month period, drove customer facing “Dashboard” events to zero with no large scale events, and internal defects to under 0.4% over hundreds of discrete full-fleet updates containing millions of deployments. Drove adoption of the EC2 Deployment Service from 70% to 97% through user engagement, internal promotion, innovation, and proactive feature enhancements such as audit trail, velocity control, blast radius safety, simplified canary testing with automated set generation, auto-scheduling, improved failure detection, and noise-reduced zonal monitoring. Accountable for a zero dashboard event defect rate while handling a 2x usage increase. Launched a patch verification and reporting system to alert on the patch level (e.g., “Green” if no known vulnerabilities) and feeding the deployment service to bring all servers to a safe state. Driven by ambitious goal to “Prepare and execute flawless software changes through controlled deployments with impact to our customers == zero”. Technologies: Linux (various flavors), AWS Systems (RDS, SQS, DynamoDB, more), Distributed Computing, Cloud management, networking, and testing. (2012 – 2013)

Amazon.com | Seattle, Washington
Senior Program Manager
Senior Program Manager for Amazon Product Ads, a CPC program to monetize traffic for e-commerce merchants on and off Amazon.com. Managed the multimillion-dollar build out of Amazon’s Ad Network systems for Owned & Operated, Direct Buy and RTB advertising placements. Upon arrival, stepped in at a critical juncture when the previous TPM moved on, and within six weeks launched two initiatives previously late by 10 weeks. Successfully launched a high throughput (50K tps) low latency (100ms) private cloud and AWS based Real Time Bidding (RTB) system. Proactively scaled system by 20x from initial launch to sniffing >1 billion bids per day for a remnant/arbitrage play with cutting edge behavioral, retargeting, and contextual targeting machine learning algorithms. Went live on Amazon Ad Exchange with Real Time Bidding and Direct Publishers as a result of a remarkable collaboration among teams spanning three continents. Managed a dozen external teams in a fast-paced environment with multiple projects in-flight for effective product specification, design, and feature releases. Scrum Master for teams of up to fourteen engineers and acting Product Manager during a six-month personnel transition.

As an individual contributor, monitored system performance, contributed to design and code reviews, and built software tools for research and analysis. Passionate about detecting fraud and curious about suspicious cart activity, modified sales attribution queries to persuasively show analytical patterns that indicated non-human bot activity. Built customized PHP web technology prototypes to demonstrate the proper use of JavaScript conversion tracking to unblock integration and performance testing. Created standalone applications and databases hitting RESTful APIs to improve the quality of ad search results for TF-IDF and Hadoop Related Ads. Technologies: Amazon internals and NoSQL database, HTML/CSS, JSON, JavaScript, PHP, VB.NET, Oracle Business Intelligence (BI), and SQL queries. (2010 – 2012)

Sony Pictures Entertainment | Los Angeles, California
Director / Senior Technical Manager / Enterprise Architect
Director level contract Senior Technical Manager and Enterprise Architect managing systems for the President of Production Administration, Chairman of Worldwide Marketing and Distribution, 4 CFO’s, 20+ vendors, 10+ internal groups, and 15+ employees. Created and managed greenfield and migration Lean / Agile / Waterfall projects for over 20 enterprise applications through all aspect of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Drove definition of deliverables, milestones and dependencies for Workplace Management Enterprise Software as a Service (SaaS) applications processing 40,000 work requests per year. Architected, developed, and debugged C# / ASP.Net, MS SQL, Oracle and XML interfaces to internal web services for SAP, Archibus, asset management, Crystal / Business Objects executive reporting, IT security and identity management systems handling 2.5M sq ft in 80 buildings with 200+ reports and billing $100M/yr. Developed and maintained requirements and schedules within an Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) environment; produced statements of work and executive presentations for a diverse set of infrastructure applications. Coordinated project release rollouts, assisted in group training classes, and managed testing for internal initiatives such as occupancy tracking, royalty distribution, and web development for both internal brand recognition (Office Art) and external customer engagement (Sony Online Emporium). Technologies: Adobe Flex, AJAX, C#/VB/ASP.Net, Java/J2EE, MS SQL, Oracle, OSCommerce, PHP / MySQL, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), SAP web services, UNIX/Linux, Windows, WordPress, and XML data feeds. Recruited from a hands on software engineering manager role to this Director level position as a “short-term, part-time” contract that continued for 7+ years uninterrupted. (2000 – 2010)

Voice Information Systems | Los Angeles, California
Founder & CEO/CTO
Founder & CEO/CTO of a successful software consulting and systems development firm with $5M+ in sales and 80%+ product market penetration. Designed and implemented innovative, competitive, and award-winning commercial software for editing and managing digital audio plus programming tools for voice processing (IVR) systems. Led, coached, and motivated an entrepreneurial start-up consisting of 20+ employees, contractors and vendors with knowledgeable, practical, results-oriented management of budget, sales, advertising, marketing, and customer experience. Hands-on developer for a graphical audio editor front-end, batch processing back-end tools for digitized sound, an English language text-to-speech engine, and a multi-threaded computer telephony hardware driver library. Researched technology trends and developed a prototype Voice-Over-IP (VOIP) Internet Telephony real-time streaming audio product using on-the-fly audio compression and low-level Winsock TCP/IP protocols. Gained end-to-end system development and management skills, plus industry experience in Telecommunications, Financial Services, Pharmaceuticals, Digital Media, and Order Fulfillment. Clients included Sony Pictures Entertainment, Metropolitan Life Insurance, Bertelsmann Media, Rhone-Poulenc Rorer Pharmaceuticals, IBM Global Business Services, and Raytheon Electromagnetic Systems Division. Technologies: Visual Basic, C++, C, Windows SDK, and 80×86 assembly. (1990 – 2000)

IBM | Los Angeles, California | Charlotte, North Carolina | San Jose, California
Software Developer
Software developer for a PC-based multi-threaded OS/2 graphical interface for a bank check signature recognition system produced jointly with Security Pacific Automation Company (SPAC). Internships at the IBM World Trade Americas/Far East Headquarters and the IBM Almaden Research Center. (1989 – 1990)

Specialties

Cloud Computing • eCommerce • Online Advertising • Media and Entertainment • Telecommunications • Investment Banking, Insurance and Finance • Information Security • Infrastructure Architecture

Proficiencies

• Program / Product Development and Management
• Ability to lead and inspire multi-disciplinary teams across domestic and international locations
• Executive management experience with both blue chip corporations and entrepreneurial startups
• Expertise in leading design, sales, and delivery of technology and business solutions
• Skilled at empowering high performing individual contributors
• Proficient at mediation and team conflict resolution

Education

MBA Candidate, The Lisbon MBA Católica | Nova, Cass of 2023
MSEE, University of Southern California, Master of Science, Computer Engineering, High Honors
BSEE, Rutgers Engineering, Bachelor of Science, Electrical Engineering, High Honors

Honors / Certifications

CT Magazine Product of the Year • CT Expo Best of Show • CT Magazine People Of The Year • TeleConnect Magazine Editors Choice • TRW Fellowship award • Certified Scrum Master • AWS Business Professional • AWS Technical Professional

Patents

US Patent #9696982, Safe host deployment for a heterogeneous host fleet
Utilizing the concepts and technologies described herein, updates to hosts in a heterogeneous host fleet can be deployed in a safe manner by conducting a test deployment before deploying the updates to all the hosts in the host fleet. Potential problems can be discovered during the test deployment and thereby mass deployment failure can be avoided. A subsequent analysis may be conducted based on the deployment data to provide recommendations for future deployments. https://goo.gl/3tXoCY

Inventions

VFEdit Professional Prompt Editor: Award winning audio editor for creating great sounding voice files for Computer Telephony Systems. VFEdit works with computer telephony sound systems in ADPCM, Mu-law, A-law and other encoding formats. • Audio Toolbox Digital Audio Processor and Converter: Batch process and convert digital audio files to and from industry standard telephony formats. Audio ToolBox is a professional quality conversion utility for the MS-DOS® and Windows® operating systems. • TI/F DLL Telephone Interface Dynamic Link Library: Award winning Telephone Interface (TI/F) Dynamic Link Library (DLL) provides a Windows compatible interface to voice communication hardware.

Objectives

I am exploring opportunities that complement my technical and business background as CEO, CTO, or CTPO; as an Operating Partner to help mentor an existing CTO; or an Advisor to find the next CTO. Private Equity and Venture Capital roles are a plus. I weigh the following five parameters: company culture, co-workers, growth opportunity, scope of influence, and location. Contact me regarding your projects!