Nik Kov

  1. Engineering
  2. Fractional CTO
  3. Team Building
  4. Hiring
  5. Leadership
  6. Full Stack Engineer

Generalist Hacker, former EM @ Hinge

Engineer with > 12 YOE spanning tiny startups to large companies. Led and built teams for Hinge for the last 3 years in a management capacity on the growth arm. At heart, a generalist hacker with experience across backend, frontend, and even mobile development. Core strengths: executing effectively, assembling good teams, thinking strategically about product and business models. Low ego, high curiosity. Passionate about shipping. Keen understanding of what motivates people to build together. Love to dig through an ambiguous problem to reach its ultimate potential.

  1. Ruby
    Ruby
  2. go
    go
  3. Python
    Python
  4. Kafka
    Kafka
  5. JavaScript
    JavaScript
  6. React
    React
  7. Redis
    Redis
  8. PostgreSQL
    PostgreSQL
Message Nik
Nik Kov

Work

  • Hinge Dating App: Match & Date

    Hinge Dating App: Match & Date

    HINGE, DESIGNED TO BE DELETED Hinge is the dating app for people who want to get off of dating apps. With profiles that show your personality through text, photos, video, and voice, you have unique conversations that lead to great dates. And it’s working. Currently, people on Hinge go on a date every three seconds. Additionally, in 2022, we were the fastest-growing dating app in the US, UK, and Canada. HOW WE GET YOU OFF HINGE When it comes to online dating, people are so busy matching that they’re not actually connecting, in person, where it counts. Hinge is on a mission to change that. So we built an app that’s designed to be deleted. Here’s how: * We quickly learn your type. You’ll only be introduced to the best people for you. * We give you a sense of someone’s personality. You’ll get to know potential dates through their unique answers to prompts, as well as information like religion, height, politics, dating intentions, relationship type, and much more. * We make it easy to start a conversation. Every match begins by someone liking or commenting on a specific part of your profile. * We want you to feel confident about meeting people in person. Selfie Verification makes it easier for daters on Hinge to ensure that they are who they say they are. * We ask how your dates are going. After exchanging phone numbers with a Match, we’ll follow up to hear how your date went so we can make better recommendations in the future. The app is free to use. Members looking to see everyone who likes them or send unlimited likes can upgrade to Hinge+. To access additional features, including enhanced recommendations and priority likes, we offer HingeX. PRESS "It's the go-to dating app for many people looking for love." - The Daily Mail “Hinge’s CEO says a good dating app relies on vulnerability, not algorithms.” - Washington Post "Hinge is the first dating app to actually measure real-world success" - TechCrunch SUBSCRIPTION INFO Payment will be charged to Apple Account at confirmation of purchase Subscription automatically renews unless auto-renew is turned off at least 24-hours before the end of the current period Account will be charged for renewal within 24-hours prior to the end of the current period Subscriptions may be managed and auto-renewal may be turned off by going to Account Settings after purchase Support: hello@hinge.co Terms of Service: https://hinge.co/terms.html Privacy Policy: https://hinge.co/privacy.html All photos are of models and used for illustrative purposes only.

    https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hinge-dating-app-match-date/id595287172

Experience

  • Hinge

    Hinge

    Engineering Manager

    Nov 2020 - Nov 2023

    One of the most widely used dating apps in the world

    • Built & lead the notifications team responsible for giving users the confidence in their dating journey by keeping them engaged & informed through in-app messaging as well as push and email
    • Led entire Growth initiative responsible for monetization, short term retention & international expansion
    • Scaled the team from 1 to 7 fantastic backend engineers and transitioned the team to full cycle ownership involving a responsible & fair on-call process
    • Created a multi-year innovative engineering vision for the team which helped inform short term roadmap creation with realistic OKRs
  • Casper

    Casper

    Tech Lead

    Jan 2018 - Nov 2020

    Premiere e-commerce brand of mattresses shipped in a box

    • Created/presented a technical design around a new centralized API which I then developed including dynamic Stripe-like documentation resulting in the adoption of it in external teams
    • Hired an amazing contractor to re-architect some of our complicated tax logic which reduced our end of month tax discrepancies by over 90%
    • Load tested a service using Artillery and Datadog for tracing slower aspects of the code and then refactored the service to pass the performance test expectations and wrote up a blog post about the process and findings
    • Collaborated with data engineers and developed a product recommendation feature which produced a higher AOV along e-commerce channels
  • Wellpass

    Wellpass

    Senior Software Engineer

    Aug 2016 - Nov 2017

    Messaging platform in healthcare connecting providers with patients. The app would come pre-installed on phones given to people for free via Obamacare.

    • Owned & released our first iOS/Android app into their respective markets built with React Native
    • Refactored our framework-less Java codebase into Play Framework
    • Initiated a piecemeal refactor for the legacy Django code to use React in the frontend
  • Jukely

    Jukely

    Senior Software Engineer

    May 2015 - Jun 2016

    Concert Subscription app -- Pay 25$ a month to get unlimited access to concerts

    • Re-architected the backend admin tool to speed up iteration and deployment
    • Built out the login and signup/checkout with Stripe system for our new app for the release in Swift 2
    • Built out a system for promoters working with Jukely to be able to query our system via text messages
    • Forked and contributed certain changes to an open source project which we used in our admin section to optimize & increase fetching speed
  • Crowdtap

    Crowdtap

    Engineer

    Nov 2012 - May 2015

    Brand Marketing App -- You'd take surveys, earn rewards, and brands would use the information to influence their decisions on products.

    • Created an intelligent multi threaded polling system of users’ Facebook & Twitter accounts to aggregate and calculate various engagements from the respective platforms
    • Released Crowdtap’s first mobile application into the app store
    • Took lead on rewriting, testing and deploying a member front facing page in AngularJS, which was mobile compatible as well
    • Won an internal company hackathon which included building a mobile app with the Ionic framework App was given a longer lifespan by management and released to a subset of users

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