Engineering Manager / Senior Engineer
Hackster.io
Hackster.io
As Engineering Manager / TPM and Senior Software Engineer at Hackster.io, I led the turnaround of a large top of funnel marketplace/community platform serving hardware developers worldwide.
My work focused on platform modernization, performance optimization, and compliance while maintaining high development velocity as the primary engineering contributor.
Key Achievements
- 61.5% YoY increase in codebase activity (2023→2024) before AI adoption, sustained additional +30.8% into 2025 post AI adoption
- Primary engineer sustaining feature delivery on a founder-built Rails monolith and 9+ interconnected services across the platform ecosystem
- Built the Giveaways platform end-to-end: registration guards, winner management (addresses, countries, tier badges), and new-vs-existing-user analytics
- Shipped GDPR Compliance System: cookie consent banner, Google Tag Manager Consent Mode, cookie-policy pages, and consent-gated analytics
- Upgraded the stack from Rails 6 to Ruby 3 + Rails 7; led PostgreSQL major-version upgrades with near-zero downtime
- Optimized FYP performance via GraphQL eager loading and cached-table migration; fixed memory config to stop 503 dyno crashes
- 12% Core Web Vital improvements resulting in 1.2s faster average page loads
- 96% query optimization on high-traffic pages
- Built a reusable survey system used across the platform (drag-and-drop ranking), with a CSS-split/lazy-load strategy to keep the main bundle lean
- Shipped user verification & tier system with tier-aware cache invalidation, plus spam/moderation controls
- Built an engineering pipeline dashboard from scratch and hardened the analytics-ETL pipeline with retry logic and per-run job tracing
- Championed dependency upgrades and AI-assisted development; mentored engineers through regular 1:1s
- Identified WCAG/WAI-ARIA accessibility best practices to improve upon
Technologies Used
- TypeScript
- Rails
- PostgreSQL
- Sentry
- Heroku
- CSS Modules
- Ruby
- React
- BigQuery
- LookerStudio
- GraphQL
- Sidekiq
- Google Cloud
- Webpack
- Redis
- AWS S3
- Fastly CDN
- Cloudflare
- Draft.js
- Algolia
- REST APIs