Bojan Rajkovic

Hi, I’m Bojan. I’m a technology generalist, with interest areas in engineering systems & culture, API design, and performance engineering.

About Me

Broadly speaking, I’m T-shaped — I’m comfortable leading teams and managing people, diving into code (writing, reviewing, debugging, optimization, etc.), building infrastructure, working on engineering systems and culture, building software development lifecycle policy, structuring out knowledge management (ask me about why it’s key to healthy organizations!), and designing systems architectures. I’m a Git wizard, a comfortable and proficient technical writer, and I love to teach and mentor.

I’m comfortable learning on the fly — I firmly believe that for most engineers, the things you already know aren’t important, but your curiosity and learning/knowing how to learn are what will determine your success. I love building organizations and finding efficiences and economies of scale and structure that make collaboration easier; my teams are consistently highly engaged with their work, deeply care about their customers and products, and it shows in their outcomes.

If you’re a startup, I also bring experience in the business of startups — the team I led at Xamarin worked closely with finance, sales, and executive teams to devise and build new approaches to collating and understanding business data, and extract insights that correlated to how we built and shipped our software.

Experience

Director, Software Engineering at SimpliSafe

From May 2021 to Present

  • Led technology and engineering for SimpliSafe's professional alarm monitoring business, with a highly engaged team of 20 engineering and QA staff, along with 10 supporting staff from TPM, PM, and operations. During my time, surveyed engagement scores for my organization have been 15+ points above the company average, and 30+ above in key areas of leadership and management.
  • Built an organizational structure that enabled a smooth integration of engineering staff and product managers into delivery and outcome-focused teams, resulting in on-time delivery of 4 major programs between June 2022 and now that increased NPS, reduced recurring costs, and built competitive advantage
  • Partnered with product, business, operations, and executives to define and promulgate our strategy and roadmap for the professional monitoring business
  • Worked across the engineering organization to drive systems design improvements to improve alarm monitoring outcomes and experiences, and drive improvements in systems outside of my immediate purview
  • Work with dispatch partners to ensure scalable, reliable, and performant delivery of alarms, tools that enable faster and more accurate decision making, and prioritized dispatch of first responders

Technologies: JavaScript/TypeScript, AWS (ECS/EKS, DocumentDB, DynamoDB, etc.), Kafka, OpenTelemetry

Director, Systems Architecture at First Republic Bank

From February 2019 to April 2021

  • Led architecture efforts on enterprise-wide initiatives for API gateway and real-time data implementations with Apigee and Kafka
  • Led a small architecture team working as horizontal solution architecture and API experts for a banking core replacement effort (10+ major workstreams, 50+ total projects), serving 100s of engineers and solution architects
  • Led enterprise efforts on software quality and SDLC compliance, including devising new quality metrics based on engineering community health
  • Built out developer guidance on application architecture/non-functional requirements, software patterns, system design, and API design
  • Worked with diverse teams across lines of business to help drive technology roadmaps, as well as identify opportunities for strategic alignment and reuse
  • Served as a subject matter expert on all aspects of software development: technology stack selection, framework/library evaluation, code review, etc.
  • Worked with teams to help transition and structure new knowledge management facilities, including moving information from Sharepoint to Confluence, and establihing workflow guidelines for Jira

Technologies: Kafka, Apigee, .NET Core, JavaScript/TypeScript, OpenShift/Kubernetes, AWS

Principal Engineering Manager at CareStack

From October 2018 to December 2018

  • Led a tribe of 17 engineers working on the front office portions of CareStack's dental practice management system
  • Championed and implemented engineering systems and culture changes to improve throughput, output quality, and quality-of-life for developers
  • Mentored engineers on the team, ranging from senior to very junior and organized team into multiple squads with product focus areas to further improve the way we worked
  • Led a release that fixed dozens of bugs and resulted in dramatic stability and reliability improvements, including a 1000x performance improvement in a key billing component
  • Short tenure resulted from a disagreement between the CEO and the entire senior engineering staff about best practices

Technologies: Azure, SQL Server, .NET, TypeScript/JavaScript

Sr. Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft

From July 2016 to September 2018

  • Planned and executed on transition of Xamarin services and teams into Microsoft as part of Microsoft's acquisition of Xamarin
  • Moved to the Xamarin Workbooks team as part of winding down Xamarin infrastrucure and operations
  • Drove Workbooks integration with Xamarin.Forms, including integration into the layout inspector and evaluation engine, as well as correct mapping of the native and Xamarin.Forms visual trees
  • Led accessibility improvements to the desktop client and web editing surface, including new design and color elements
  • Implemented an improved plugin/pipeline system that powered 3rd party integrations with Workbooks
  • Built a WebAssembly evaluation environment for Xamarin Workbooks that leveraged a horizontally scalable server-side for compilation, while remoting execution into a WebAssembly-hosted Mono VM
  • Worked closely with relese engineering/management teams to maintain and improve engineering/build systems that powered day-to-day work and release efforts

Technologies: Xamarin, .NET, Cocoa/AppKit, Android, TypeScript, WASM, Azure DevOps

Engineering Manager/Operations Lead at Xamarin

From February 2012 to July 2016

  • Led the team responsible for most of Xamarin's customer-facing infrastructure (Xamarin Store, Component Store, Single Sign-On, Licensing)
  • Scaled and optimized infrastructure, serving a few billion API calls per month on minimal hardware
  • Devised a novel approach to licensing infrastructure from both the server and client side, resulting in more robust client licensing, and greatly improved performance, reliability, and debuggability of the infrastructure itself
  • Developed and maintained processes to improve efficiency of sales and support process, reducing the time it took to deliver and fulfill a customer quote to <30s
  • Worked closely with finance and executive teams on business intelligence, fundraising, and general operations understanding. Devised new spins and presentations of data, and correlated it to product decisions and output.
  • Built the Xamarin component store and worked on its integration into the Xamarin Studio IDE, as well as contributing general fixes to the IDE

Technologies: .NET, AWS, Azure, Salesforce, GTK+, JavaScript, Redis, SQL Server, MySQL

Software Developer/Consultant at Cane Systems

From August 2010 to February 2012

  • Worked as an on and off-site consultant in the telecommunications industry, focusing on operations support systems (OSS) and other network/physical plant management projects
  • Developed a new system for tracking fixed assets and points of presence, including rich mapping and navigation capabilities built in
  • Built solutions to collect and manage hardware inventory and hardware status from native systems that did not integrate into centralized OSS

Technologies: Java, PostgreSQL, Oracle DB, Cisco/Juniper

Software Developer at Air Power Analytics

From February 2009 to February 2012

  • Rewrote a sensor metrics collection platform from the ground up, delivering multiple order of magnitude improvements in polling and memory efficiency
  • Built infrastructure to securely deliver collected data back to central server from each on-site location, and pre-process it for ETL
  • Built two front-ends, a "live" frontend that could run on any computer on the same network as the collection platform and view live data, and a reporting frontend that worked off ETLed data
  • Evaluated and identified hardware with suitable characteristics for metrics collection platform that was suitable for use in industrial plants

Technologies: Java, C#, ActionScript/Flash, PHP, Oracle, Serial Protocols

Awards and Publications

  • SimpliSafe FY2023 Inventor of the Year

  • Multiple pending patent applications from my work at SimpliSafe

Contacting Me

The best way to reach me re: hiring is via email. You can also message me on LinkedIn, or find my Twitter, etc.