Experience

Kai.ai

• Israel
• Health, Wellness & Fitness
• 1 - 100 Employee

• Chief Architect

  • Feb 2022 - Present

  Kai's mission is to provide emotional support for teenagers using conversational AI on top of popular messaging platforms like Discord, Apple Messages, Telegram, and Whatsapp. As Chief Architect, my main responsibilities are: 1. System architecture 2. Performance and Stability 3. Engineering development experience 4. Product development System Architecture: In my role, my focus is on re-architecting Kai's system to handle extremely large scale at a lower cost and increase user experience integrity. The essence of the new architecture is to move from a request-response model on top of a single web application hosted on Heroku, to a data pipeline based on queues for processing inbound and outbound messaging hosted on AWS infrastructure using state-of-the-art IaC infrastructure which we built in-house on top of CDK and Pulumi. Performance and Stability: My responsibilities are to reduce the latency of message processing from 10-30s to sub-second, optimizing database queries and their usage within the system, and rebuilding parts of Kai's content system to make simpler and optimized queries, to provide blazing fast user experience even when loading large datasets. As part of this responsibility, I have also integrated advanced monitors, investigating and solving customer issues, and working through logs and metrics to proactively find looming issues within the system. Engineering development experience: Implementing a continuous deployment pipeline, working on build time optimizations, testing constructs to allow writing tests fast and execution them faster and various system refactoring to improve time to value when modifying and adding new features. Product development Working on the core product itself - implementing various features and enhancements to the conversational AI, with a time-to-value mindset. Show less



Tomorrow.io

• United States
• Software Development
• 100 - 200 Employee

• Software Architect - SaaS applications group

  • Aug 2021 - Jan 2022

  The SaaS applications group is responsible for the Tomorrow.io SaaS products offering:1. API suite: A complete API suite that allows the customers to get weather data and manage the entire platform2. Weather Intelligence Platform: An all-in-one weather and business analysis application. Get a clear view of where, when, and HOW weather will impact your business. Prepare, take actions and collaborate across the organization on top of the platform to be prepared for any weather related challenge3. Insights & Alerts: Rule based engine on top of weather and user data, that allows customers to define business requirements as rules, get alerted in advance according to forecast and visualize as a command and control dashboardAs the Architect, i was responsible for the overall architecture of the entire platform, driving improvements and large scale changes from inception to implementation, while collaborating with Product, Business and the other groups in engineering, to facilitate velocity, quality and user experience. 1. Leading production stability task force - building a production engineering culture across all the engineering teams. From deciding on production systems KPIs, , tracking them on top of all the various systems and improving over time2. Planing the DevOps backlog focusing on sustainable infrastructure and IaC3. Building and planning the group and engineering technical roadmap4. Inception of a new weather alerting system on top of insights, focusing on scale, product enhancements, development velocity and efficiency. The new system started with a measure first approach, starting with a small POC and improving over time up until it was released to all the customers with staggering improvements for the user experience by significantly reducing false positives and notifications fatigue5. Leading various improvements and research within the platform itself and its infrastructure6. Building data pipelines for analytics and production data analysis Show less

• Software Architect - Platform group

  • Dec 2019 - Aug 2021

  The Platform group in Tomorrow.io is responsible for our end-user products for businesses and developers. The platform has three main products:1. API: providing Tomorrow.io's weather data and platform services via API2. Hypercast: An all-in-one weather security and business analysis application. Get a clear view of where, when, and HOW weather will impact your business, set up customized alerts for specific locations and weather conditions and share the information and actions needed across your organization.3. Insights & Alerts: Rule based engine running on top of Tomorrow.io's proprietary weather data. Customers define any set of conditions on our weather and create visualizations and alerts on top of weather events, allowing customers to prepare and operate accordinglyIn my role as an Architect, I am responsible for the overall architecture of our entire platform, from concept to implementation, on various aspects such as cost, performance, security, standards, design and code quality.Some of my recent responsibilities:1. Self-service: leading the design and implementation for self service for the Platform, allowing users to enroll independently. Main focus of the project was first and foremost security, backward compatibility to the existing user base, Sales processes and engaging UX2. Insights scale: Investigate, plan and execute improvements of the insights engine pipeline which enables it to handle millions of insights and alerts within the time constraints of weather changes. In the course of the project I lead and implemented changes in the architecture, operations and logic of the pipeline, improving performance and reducing the cost by 10x3. Transition to a single platform: leading the architecture and standards for a new version of the platform, consolidating all the products under a single business product that provides extensive new capabilities, while allowing our business to create and manage customer plans, up-sales and upgrades Show less

• Data Engineering Architect - Data Group

  • Feb 2019 - Dec 2019

  The Data group is responsible for processing weather data algorithms and converting the data to a format that can be consumed by our customers via ClimaCell's API.In my role as Data Engineering Architect I took an End2End approach, taking part in development of the data pipeline itself and the API that serves the processed data and collaborating with the R&D department which are responsible for the algorithms themselves.The major part of my role was to stabilize the architecture of the data pipeline and planning the next generation architecture with a keen focus on stability, low latency and cost reduction which led us to handle 100x of the scale we handled up to that point.Performance of the pipeline and the API is a key aspect, and as such I led performance efforts in the group, installing methodologies, techniques and tools which I used to investigate and solve performance issues ranging from coding issues, operational and platform issues up to Cloud issues.In my role I also assumed the DevOps role of the group, and had end-to-end responsibility of the automation pipelines and production stability.Using the GCP platform and tools like k8s I was able to optimize our resources to a lower cost and larger scale and throughput. Show less



Sears Israel

• Israel
• Technology, Information and Internet
• 1 - 100 Employee

• Software Architect

  • Jan 2018 - Feb 2019

  Sears Israel is the team behind ShopYourWay.com, an innovative Social e-commerce experience. Shop Your Way is unique by creating personalized experiences for users based on user profiling and actions.As the architect, I lead overhaul architecture of a production grade application on all of its aspects - web, mweb and mobile.Connecting business and product requirements to technical solutions.Mentoring tech leads, developers and team leaders, focusing on technical aspects of growth.Lead Open Source releases of various components from Shop Your Way's main application, from a technical and methodological standpoints, reshaping internal culture towards Open Source thinking and community contribution:https://github.com/shopyourwayhttps://blog.house-of-code.com/abstracting-dependencies-to-keep-a-flat-dependency-tree-between-components/Lead technological advancements, and system architectural changes:• Transition to .Net Core from .Net framework to our entire application, starting from dependency libraries, our own components throughout internal projects and web applications• Introducing Entity Component system into our existing application to provide a composeable, pluggable experience to content managers while keeping the code base maintainable and extensible• Transition from single monolith application to a contract/service base application Show less

• Engineering Group Tech Lead

  • Jul 2015 - Jan 2018

  Lead the technology aspect of an Engineering group focused on Mobile, IoT, and Globalization of the Shop Your Way product.I was responsible for defining the technical vision of the group and product, creating a plan and executing it while enlisting developers from all across R&D to participate.I focused on mentoring developers, team leaders, and tech leads from other on technical aspects of growth.Lead internal OSS mentality across R&D, with a component-based mindset, by extracting and generalizing building blocks of Shop Your Way's server and client applications and reuse them to compose new applications while sharing technical knowledge and abilities to create production-grade products in an efficient and fast way.Design and implement high-level aspects of mobile API architecture - such as server controlled flows and composite UI - allowing to change the mobile app look & feel with server changes instead of deploying a new version to the app stores. Show less

• Special Projects Division: IoT Tech Lead

  • Mar 2015 - Jul 2016

  In 2014 I've started an innovation lab within Sears Israel, focused on reinvent the shopping experience. After couple of months an opportunity presented itself and we started on an IoT project called Alfie - A personal assistant at your finger tips.In one month me and a small team prototyped and designed three physical IoT devices. During this time I practiced 3D printing, modeling and basic electronics.Moving to production stage I also practiced embedded programming (C/C++), consumer device manufacturing, as I experimented with different models, materials and designs. Since Alfie was a voice operated device, I used speech recognition and speech synthesis to translated the data for analysis, to allow our systems to respond to the user properly,One million units from Alfie were manufactured and more then 200K distributed to users. Throughout the experience, I've applied fullstack engineering practices on the embedded and IoT development process, such as automatic software and hardware testing, Continuous Deployment and fleet management for the device software. Show less

• Mobile Tech Lead

  • Feb 2014 - Mar 2015

  Lead the technology aspect of a the mobile engineering group which developed the Shop Your Way mobile apps.As the mobile tech lead, I was responsible for the technical growth of the mobile group engineers. My focus was connecting the dots between different groups, domains, and features to create a clear technical vision for the mobile group, R&D and the product.One of my responsibilities was to introduce the mobile group to development and execution principles that were known in other server-oriented environments. As part of this responsibility, I introduced continues delivery methods to the group and built an entire CI eco-system for mobile and create a “one click release” vision to the group which shared the goal to be able to release a new version to the different app stores at any given point.The starting point of this vision was a CI ecosystem which included:• Automatic builds for iPhone and Android applications• Introducing the unit tests world to the mobile group developers and create a CI system to execute those unit tests and UI tests on the mobile apps • Automatic packaging of the iPhone and Android applications.• Automatic publishing to the Android Play Store• Integration with the existing server-side CI system to allow the creation of complex testing scenarios, such as integration tests with server changes and app testing for API changes.Develop tools and methodologies for distributed development between teams across countries, allowing expedited development of Shop Your Way's mobile app and extended support across time zones. I was responsible for all aspects, from introduction of a new source control system, training developers abroad, automated release processes for the mobile apps and mentoring internal and external developers. Show less

• IM Fullstack Engineer

  • Feb 2013 - Feb 2014

  Driving and implementing various recommendation and personalization algorithms to provide a real time impact on user’s experience at scale. Some examples:• Real time recommendation algorithm based on user profiling and user interactions. The algorithm uses user actions and characteristics to provide real time topics of interest. • Real time dynamic content engine, allowing users to discover anything from products, deals, videos, up to articles and photos, according to community signals and interests. The two major aspects of this engine are content collection - using various data sources to automatically collect and tag content that may be relevant to users, and content ranking - boosting relevant content to a specific user in real time according to his interests, and other community based signals.• Product ranking system – A system which can compare hundreds of millions of products in an empirical way, and help the users to make informed decisions before purchase. The system ranked each product relative to other comparable products using statistical analysis – using various metrics like ratings, views and purchases. This capability increased cart additions by 12%.I lead Continuous Deployment in Sears Israel - moving from weekly deployments to dozens of deployments each day.I was responsible for every aspect: from technical challenges, methodological changes in the developer's day 2 day work to the cultural shift of the entire company. The impact of CD was huge - allowing the company to move faster, react quickly to changes, like changing the app behavior during high season load (Black Friday for example) with high confidence and low friction to developers, product and business alike.I'm a advocate, presenting this topic in several conferences and meetups. Show less

• Appliction Platform Engineer

  • Dec 2011 - Jan 2013

• Fullstack Software Engineer

  • Jul 2011 - Dec 2011

  Developing features for ShopYourWay.com (formally social.sears.com), a social e-commerce application driven by personalization and discovery.As a fullstack developer, I was responsible for building features from spec to production (and beyond) handling all related challenges - frontend, backend, storage.Since I'm a quality freak, I was leading TDD, CI & automation culture (including training and mentoring new and experienced developers) in the transition from traditional QA to and R&D with automation capability and culture. I also built frameworks for writing and running performant integration and system tests, optimizing runtime and reduced friction for writing tests. Show less



IAF - Israeli Air Force

• Team Leader

  • Jul 2009 - Jul 2011

  Software development team leader of Microsoft's .Net and GIS technologies

• Software Developer

  • Jan 2006 - Jul 2009