Bogdan Cirlig
Engineering at Rippling
Bogdan Cirlig
Engineering at Rippling
San Francisco Bay Area
Overview
Work Experience
Engineering @ Rippling - HIRING in US and BLR
2023 - Current
My role is to be the CTO for Benefits product vertical (within Rippling compound startup) and I will share a story about why this is so exciting. I need your help to build this awesome pillar that's driving double digit % of the top-line revenue for Rippling. Every year, employers and employees spend over $5 trillion on work related benefits globally. From health insurance to saving for retirement, these benefits products guide families through some of the most important and impactful decisions in life. Despite the significance of these products and the dollars spent, the experience is still painfully antiquated, expensive, and confusing. Rippling is building the first modern multi-sided marketplace that seamlessly connects brokers, employers, and employees with any benefit. Our platform powers discovery, purchase, and use of benefits products around the world. Our benefits vertical includes our Benefits Platform (recommendations, payments, and our benefits eligibility engine), our rapidly growing Benefits Marketplace of over 100 partners, and our natively-built Rippling Benefits Products.
Director of Engineering (Ad Tech | e-Commerce | Marketplace | Payments)
2020 - 2023
Amazing opportunity to lead through the most intense wartime period in Meta's existence with frequent re-orgs, changes of strategy and direction, product sunsets, layoffs and team transformations. I focused on two major areas: Global Sales & Marketing (Ads) and Facebook App Commerce. Accomplishments include: * Co-created Meta's Business Support strategy that resulted in massive investment. Relocated the team to Singapore and continued to build it there. * Landed major Ads Manager features that led to $400MM incremental annual revenue while increasing the RoAS for advertisers * Created strategy to complete critical Diversity & Inclusion (DEI) training for 1000 eng organization * Built VP level partnerships and secured XFN support that led to meeting our app performance goals * Demonstrated vision and leadership by creating external partnerships that drove the much needed Young Adult external user acquisition that contributed to overall Daily Active Users (DAU) * Analyzed FB App Commerce product gaps and user sentiment and influenced (w/o authority) the leadership group to invest in "fixing" the integrity, listing quality and performance. this resulted in increased DAU and NPS * Led from the front and drove teams transformation from growth hacking to more DevOps and Engineering Excellence maturity level. Over the course of 6 months I recruited champions and implemented a program focused on SLAs, Test coverage, onCall. this resulted in aligning to highest standards the company expected us to meet (specific metrics) * Co-elevated my XFN peers by creating opportunities for them to build deeper customer segment understanding (UXR), facilitate Product Design to have a voice in strategy and road map execution * Certified interviewer with 100 leadership interviews per year and part of the Candidate Review decision making for Meta's wide tech role hiring decisions * Led my teams through several transitions and layoffs while providing immediate stability and direction
Senior Director of Engineering (e-Commerce | Ad Tech | Payments)
2017 - 2020
Part of Merchant business unit I led 300+ engineering organization across US, India, Singapore. I was accountable for ensuring engineering execution and operations generating $1 Bln+ in annual revenue across a suite of flagship SMB products including: Merchant Onboarding and activation, Business Debit Mastercard, FundsNow, Invoicing, Payouts, Cart recovery and conversion rate optimization, Shipping & Tracking, Compliance CIP in multiple countries, Marketplace seller onboarding. For the company I've accomplished: * as Team builder: Created a top notch engineering culture and hiring outcomes, also part of the Bar Raiser steering committee to influence adoption of best practices across 23,000+ people organization. * as Talent magnet: actively involved in university hiring events across the country, Grace Hopper, hackatons/CalBears etc. I was entrusted to make spot offers at many of such events to recent college grads. Under my leadership my teams (330 engineers) achieved: * 23% improved SLA uptime availability across production stacks, Zero Px or P0s, Unit Test coverage 90%+, Say-Do ratios of min 90% * <8% voluntary regrettable attrition rate, deeper engagement from individual engineers who believe in the vision and mission, * Hired more missionaries vs mercenaries to help us ship best customer products, committed to continuous experimentation and measuring results in a true Lean Startup manner albeit inside a public large company. * Actively participated in strategic technical architecture decisions as well as lending insights to my engineering teams on best practices in building and scaling api platforms and end user experiences.
CTO, Co-founder (FinTech | Marketplace | YCombinator W16)
2015 - 2017
AlphaFlow (YCombinator W16) is the first and fastest-growing automated real estate investment service. The service combines advanced data analytics and innovative technology to provide investors with sophisticated investment management at affordable prices. (BusinessWire: https://goo.gl/jmogpE) • First engineer-founder, built and launched initial product in < 6 weeks • Went from $0 to $2.1M in venture funding and from 0 to 2,000 customers in < 1 year • Hands-on recruiting the initial Engineering team (StackOverflow, Linkedin, AngelList, own network) • Interfaced with stakeholders and buffered ebbs and flows, shielding the ENG team daily • Implemented Agile/Scrum, JIRA metrics to measure the health and efficiency of the team • Promoted practices via daily code reviews, active in tech architecture, continuous integration • Made all Buy vs. Build decisions, analyzed ROI, worked with external technology vendors • Created ENG culture based on recognition, stake in the product, learning from failures, no ego no politics, embracing change and encouraging learning and experimentation, coached and mentored • Increased code quality 12x by promoting Test Driven Development & Test Automation • Wrote API specs and helped partners integrate the crowdfunding deal syndication • Orchestrated Pen testing and established data security classification policies Technologies used: Node.js, Javascript, Angular, Mongo, Postgress, Heroku, AWS, EC2, S3, CloudFront, HTML5, Microservices, RabbitMQ, REST, APIs, JIRA, CodeShip. Stripe, Plaid, private NPM, Github, Distributed Systems, Fullstack Software Architecture
Vice President of Engineering (SaaS | Ad Tech)
2013 - 2015
Rebuilt the engineering and product which resulted in an acquisition offer from Coupons Inc. • Led the architecture and implementation of RESTFul APIs • Reduced operating cost by 65% and improved scalability by a factor of 15x • Made Build vs. Buy decisions and wired up commercial APIs such as Google Analytics, keen.io API, Facebook and twitter APIs and more to collect and report video interactions • Formulated the product vision and acted as interface between stakeholders and engineers • Implemented Agile/Scrum, JIRA metrics to measure the health and efficiency of the team Technologies used: Node.js running on Heroku, MongoDB, Redis, KOA.js & Express.js / Websockets, Angular.js, AWS, EC2, S3, CloudFront, Fullstack Software Architecture
Principal Architect (SaaS HR Analytics)
2010 - 2013
I spearheaded the technical roadmap, architecture and all technical implementation decisions that led to our successful SaaS product launch and 3 years later to an acquisition by Saba Corp for high double digit $MM. • Rebuilt the ENG team (25+) and technology stack, worked across functional global teams • Architected a SaaS platform that ran across 3 continents and handled F1000 customers such as AmericanAir, Target, Walmart, British Telecom • Worked closely with business stakeholders to identify feature sets and provide cost-benefit analysis to enable ROI estimates • Led the Mobile application initiative that delivered native cloud application support for IPhone (iOS) and Blackberry • Implemented a solid Engineering process based on Agile/SCRUM and continuous integration • Co-inventor on patent "Method and System for controlling Data Access to organizational data maintained in Hierarchical charts" http://www.google.com/patents/US20130232539 Technologies used: C#, .Net, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, JavaScript, JIRA, Confluence, Blackduck Codescan, SaaS
Enterprise Architect, TV & Digital Media (AdTech)
2009 - 2010
55 Million IoT consumer devices such as TVs (Samsung, Sony) and set top boxes (Comcast) were sending consumer interaction data every day to us. I was tasked to consuming all that data and implementing Digital Ad targeting back to those devices. Played key role in the architecture and solutions to deliver Rovi's next interactive TV Guide real time advertising platform. - Made critical design decisions and guided a multi-national technical team to implement a world class interactive rich media ad experience into the next generation TV set top boxes from Samsung, Sony and other major players. - Evaluated several technology providers such as Google/DoubleClick, AdTech, OpenX and so on. Lead technical evaluation talks and provided comparative analysis among various vendors. - Provided critical guidance in implementing robust ad tracking and reporting mechanism from over 55 mil consumer TV devices back to Rovi Advertising server farm
Tech Co-founder (Real Estate Analytics)
2006 - 2009
- Envisioned, built and launched the most comprehensive US Rental market analytics platform. - Hands on coding, architected the backend and database storage and proprietary Rent Estimate algorithms. - Actively worked on partnering with real estate companies such as Zillow and Trulia. Implemented new www.zilpy.com website 100% on node.js platform using Twitter Bootstrap Ui templates, ExpressJS, MongoDB and Redis. The whole stack runs on Heroku and it's fully integrated with github for push deployments. Exposed RESTFul API / JSON for some client side operations. I have used the following frameworks to make this happen: - nodejs/expressjs/jade/mongoose models - integrated backbone/knockback to manage server API model hydration - used Redis caching to store and manage user sessions across several servers - used restler and restify for ajax client side xml api calls (into Zillow API) - used moment.js and numeral.js for client side formatting - html5 / twitter bootstrap / jQuery / AJAX for UI work - used passport.JS for Facebook/google/local authentication strategies - secured the REST API using passport oAuth 2.0 - created tiger-geocoder open source geocoder package to provide address resolution - deployed postgres geocoding database - used postmark to send mail from within the application - integrated node-time for heroku monitoring
Lead Enterprise Architect (AdTech)
2005 - 2006
Microsoft .net Tech/lead for the Ad Server initiative. Tech leading a team of 15 software engineers to deliver Advertising.com's next Ad Serving platform that handles 150,000 transactions per second (no typo) and runs across hundreds of servers in n-Tiers. Heavily used, and hands-on UML tools such as Enterprise Architect, C#, .Net 2.0, MSMQ, XML/XPath, Threading/Thread pools, Serialization, OOP/Polymorphism, Microsoft Application Blocks, patterns such as dirty marker, object factory, etc, advanced .net concepts such as CLR tuning. Full SDLC management including nUnit/TDD approach, automated builds, defect tracking.
Lead Software Engineer (FinTech)
2004 - 2005
Tech lead on .Net platform. Successfully led the implementation on several projects. Managed resources, analyzed, architectured, planned, implemented and provided technical guidance. Used C#,.Net,Remoting,XML Web Services,SOAP/XML,Crystal Reports,Multi threading to implement a corporate print and delivery system. Used UML/Visio, flow charts, sequence diagrams, use cases, MSF/MOF to deliver quality documentation in all project life cycles. Used Waterfall/Spiral methods. Also used SCRUM process for development sprints. Designed databases under MS SQL, implemented ER diagrams, relational normalization for real time web applications. Led the www.SunTech.com project implementation and integrated with ViaServ mainframe through .Net webservices. Led the XML Web Services architecture and implementation for Private Education loans product. Worked under tight deadlines, mitigated project risks, resource conflicts and project stress.