01
2019
Building a distributed R&D center from zero
Stood up Clicktale's Kyiv engineering center with Ciklum, recruiting 14 developers and 3 team leads, and built the cross-site processes that let Israel and Ukraine ship as one team.
Tag
hiring
3 posts · 2 projects
Work
02
2012
From team lead to building a site abroad
Grew from leading a team of four on the core trading platform to founding TradeNetworks' Sofia engineering site in 2012, hiring and training it to our bar to deliver CRM and billing end to end.
Posts
3 min readI hire the judgment to catch AI, not the fluency to use it
An agent burned real money being confidently wrong while I was in meetings. That is where my thinking about hiring engineers in the AI era starts, and it does not end where the hype does.
7 min readI fixed the funnel everywhere. A 40% pay gap beat me at home.
Time-to-hire fell from 45 days to 30 everywhere the blocker was process. Israel, my home site, moved zero, because the blocker was a salary band. You can't interview your way through a 40% comp gap. The pipe-or-wall test I should have run in week one.
5 min readYou can teach Kubernetes. You can't teach someone to stop being a jerk.
Tech leads are made, mostly. The asterisk is the short list you cannot install in an adult: honesty, empathy, the credit reflex, decency under pressure. The two-pile sort, the promotion I refused at a real cost, and the legibility trap that hands brilliant jerks the title.