From team lead to building a site abroad

This is where I stopped being the person who wrote the code and became the person responsible for the people who did.

First, a team of four

From 2010 I led a team of four developers on the core financial-services backend (C#/.NET, RabbitMQ, MSSQL). We delivered core trading-platform features while the team grew, and I learned the thing that took: you scale a team through mentoring and honest code review, not heroics. Hiring as we went, I set the bar I would keep raising for the next decade.

Then, a site in Sofia

In 2012 I stepped up to Engineering Manager, leading the core Trading Platform team in Israel and founding a brand-new engineering team in Sofia, Bulgaria, from the ground up. I recruited and trained developers to our technical standards and culture rather than treating Sofia as a cheaper pair of hands. It paid off: the Sofia team owned and shipped key systems end to end, including CRM and billing.

The lesson that stuck

Founding Sofia in 2012 was my first time standing up an engineering site from zero in another country. Hire to the bar, give real ownership, hold the same standards everywhere. I have built every distributed team since on those same three rules, from Kyiv at Clicktale to a forty-person org across five countries today.