Fedja B.

Experience

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  Machined

  Founder and CTO

  Feb 2023 - Present

  Machined AI helps businesses and agencies boost their organic traffic with SEO-optimized content - I am the Founder and CTO

  • Bootstrapped to $100k ARR in <3 months
  • Reduced churn by 60% over the course of 6 months, in an industry where high churn is defacto
  • Designed a scalable low-code architecture that supports 1,000s of users running 1,000,000s of isolated AI workloads every month
  • Designed a resilient AI subsystem capable of automatically managing API failures allowing stateless stop-and-continue
  • Designed a groundbreaking feature that brings realtime context into AI generated content, along with citations to the sources used
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  Intercom

  Senior Software Engineering Manager

  Sep 2021 - Jun 2022

  Intercom is the complete customer service platform for business messaging and help desk - I was responsible for the newly formed flagship Web Messenger Team.

  • Delivered a cornerstone project in collaboration with 3 other groups and 5 teams across the org
  • Took ownership of a long-standing org-wide security initiative, built a working group to tackle it and delivered the first milestone
  • Coached high-profile senior/staff engineers through promotion with year-round mentorship and support, collaboration on their promo docs and advocating for them across the engineering group
  • Mentored a (historically) low-performing engineer through his long-outstanding promotion by providing regular one-on-one sessions and creating the space for him to exhibit his seniority
  • Advised group leads on reorg decisions and their impact on people and engineering
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  EF Education First

  Software Engineering Manager

  Jan 2019 - Sep 2021

  EF Education First is the world's largest private education company - I was accountable for the English Live engineering group.

  • Launched our next generation online language learning platform 🚀🚀🚀
  • Constructed a new engineering strategy and roadmap merging our B2B and B2C platforms
  • Reduced platform cost by 50% by migrating to AWS EKS and utilising spot worker instances
  • Introduced 10% time allocation for R&D, cross-team working groups, lunch-and-learns and demo days
  • Championed SRE practices and devops culture; introduced objectives and error budgets, 24/7 support and blameless post-mo
  • Championed full-stack observability including logging, metrics and distributed tracing complemented by cross-platform product analytics
  • Introduced git commit and pull request analytics enabling managers to provide better coaching for engineers
  • Drove PaaS and SaaS adoption across the organisation
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  Sequoia Capital LLP

  Head of Software Development

  Jun 2008 - Jan 2019

  Sequoia Capital is a London based group of companies that specialise in low-latency systematic trading - I was accountable for engineering strategy and delivery across the group.

  • Built a top-tier engineering function by hiring "10x" software and devops engineers
  • Reduced execution costs by $350k per year by deciding to build rather than buy, replacing the legacy third-party trading platform with an in-house custom built system
  • Decreased our trade execution time by over 800% through building a custom FIX engine, highly optimized for ultra-low latency trading (open sourced)
  • Reduced backtesting time from hours to minutes by designing and building a specialized big data storage system for our market data, 10 years of 250 million datapoints per day with a median query time of 5ms
  • Introduced realtime PnL monitoring that enabled traders and quants to visualize the impact of trades in real time, and even before they were actually executed - previously this process was 24 hours delayed
  • Saved the quant team 30 hours per week by advocating for and building a trading platform shim that allowed them to write production-ready execution algos directly in python, their language of choice