Martin Hlavac

A seasoned leader and innovator with experience spanning Platform Engineering and Consumer products, I have 16 years of engineering and 8 years of management experience. Currently focused on building amazing products that customers love while driving business value. Skilled in leading teams and solving complex problems, I am adept at driving operational excellence and efficiency. I am open to both in-office and remote work opportunities.

Experience

Flink, Associate Director of Engineering —— Apr 2025 - Now

Skills: People & Product Mgmt., GCP, Python, GoLang, K8s, TF, Helm, Datadog, Incident.io, ArgoCD, Temporal, GitHub CI

• Leading Consumer Domain with 4 teams focusing on Next Day Delivery and market expansion.
• Led quarterly planning (Q3/Q4) creating planning documents and collaborating across Chapters, Platform, Web, and iOS teams.
• Fostered cross-functional partnerships with Product, Engineering, Data, and Business teams for successful project delivery.
• Enhanced Prime membership program with improved user experience and new cancellation flow to drive retention.
• Led fraud prevention initiatives and collaborated on PSP-related fraud solutions.
• Streamlined incident management process and led postmortems for major incidents affecting cart service and pricing.
• Improved vendor management with thorough analysis of Twilio and Segment usage, identifying cost savings opportunities.

Flink, Senior Engineering Manager —— Jul 2024 - Apr 2025

Skills: People & Product Mgmt., GCP, Python, GoLang, K8s, TF, Helm, Datadog, PagerDuty, ArgoCD, Temporal, GitHub CI

• Led Platform Domain reorganization, successfully merging two platform teams into unified Platform team.
• Drove significant cloud cost reduction: Mainly through GPC and DataDog cost savings.
• Improved developer productivity by leading GitHub Copilot adoption for and managing Docker Desktop transition.
• Established single source of truth for service ownership that enabled teams to control services in fully self-service way.
• Resolved critical platform instability by leading task force that eliminated “notorious iOS 1200 bug”.
• Launched Developer Experience (DevEx) team from ground up with clear mission focused on developer acceleration.
• Enhanced engineering culture by scaling company-wide mentorship program.
• Optimized incident management tooling by migrating from PagerDuty to Incident.io.

Flink, Platform Software Engineering Manager —— Jun 2023 - Jul 2024

Skills: People & Product Mgmt., GCP, Python, GoLang, K8s, TF, Helm, Datadog, PagerDuty, ArgoCD, Temporal, GitHub CI

• Established Platform Product roadmap with transparent planning process and measurable quarterly goals.
• Implemented “Self-Directed 20%” time, empowering engineers to work on passion projects leading to tools like Flinkit Web.
• Increased stakeholder engagement by growing Platform Demo attendance from 5 to 20+ participants through workshops and newsletter.
• Improved operational health with weekly Platform Health Checks and 100% postmortem coverage for P1 incidents.
• Managed team through performance reviews and calibrations post-layoffs, maintaining eNPS score +1 above engineering average.

Wayfair, Senior Software Engineering Manager —— Feb 2017 - Apr 2023

Skills: People & Product Mgmt., GCP, PHP, Java, Spring Boot, Maven/Gradle, Kubernetes, Docker, Symfony, Composer, Buildkite, MSSQL

Majority of my time and effort was managing and leading Engineering Effectiveness teams (Internal Development Platform) to accelerate thousands of engineers across the whole organization.

• Managed for 4 and a half years within Engineering Effectiveness teams.
• Founded the PHP Platform team to accelerate over 1000 PHP engineers at Wayfair.
• Executed a proof of concept (POC) for the containerization of our PHP monolith and databases, leading to significant improvements in our development lifecycle.
• Internal and external hiring to staff the PHP Platform (completely from scratch), Coding at Scale (adding 2 members), and Java Platform teams (also adding 2 members).
• Created Project Templates, significantly reducing the time to provision new services from days to minutes.
• Introduced static analysis into our CI/CD pipelines, decreasing the number of bugs in production.
• Significantly improved our monolith (~15m lines of code) CI pipeline, cutting down the run time from over 40 minutes to 5 minutes.
• Help transition the company from the monolith (both code and data decoupling) to microservices on Kubernetes, by providing teams decoupled libraries, Docker images, Helm charts, project templates and partnerships with product teams. Partnered with dozens of Infrastructure and product teams along the way
• Upgraded entire Wayfair codebase to up-to-date version of PHP, introducing various monitoring and automation tools to reduce the toil of future upgrades
• Managed teams with up to 15 engineers combined.
• Established roadmaps for PHP Platform and Java Platform teams.
• Advocated for, scoped and prioritized toil reduction efforts across Transportation EU teams as a DevTechPromoter (I was the first with the role and helped to formulate it)
• Provide the whole technology organization with libraries, Docker images, Helm charts and guidance to use Java and PHP effectively
• Introduced concept of Release Trains, scheduled monthly releases of internal libraries and tools to accelerate teams and mitigate security risks of out-of-date versions
• Formed JVM guilds in EU and US to connect product teams and drive knowledge sharing
• Enabling engineering teams to self-service orchestration of infrastructure resources to further support decoupling and toil reduction

Cosmic Beacon Ltd., CTO & Co-founding Partner —— Jun 2015 - Dec 2016

Skills: PHP, Typescript, Symfony, PostgreSQL, Saltstack, Gearman, Docker, Jenkins, Vagrant, YouTrack

• Co-founded a company to create an online platform for Property Owners and Property Managers.
• Hired and led a team of 4 engineers.
• Built the platform from the ground up, including the frontend, backend, and infrastructure.
• Containerized the entire local development environment, enabling engineers to build, test, and deploy with a single command.
• Engaged directly with our customers for product discovery.

Full Stack Developer, Customer Alliance GmbH. —— _Sep 2013 - Jun 2015

Skills: PHP, Typescript, Scala, MySQL, Symfony, Sass, Jenkins, SVN, Git

• Developed a Booking Engine for Hotels, offering a high level of customization for various upselling products.
• Worked on full-stack development for our main Review Management product.
• Implemented the majority of our frontend styles.
• Made various tech-stack improvements: migration from SVN to Git, transition from CSS to SASS, and adoption of Typescript.
• Handled database migrations using Doctrine ORM.

Developer, later Team Leader, Publero s.r.o. —— Mar 2011 - Sep 2013

Skills: PHP, Javascript, MySQL, Gearman, Twitter Bootstrap

• Worked on full-stack development before transitioning to a team lead role.
• Managed backlog in addition to team leadership duties.
• Introduced Scrum and facilitated migration from Zend to Symfony 2.
• Implemented Gearman for workflow management.
• Adopted git-flow for release cycle management.
• Introduced Doctrine ORM for database management.

Developer, Synergio s.r.o. —— _Oct 2010 - Mar 2011

Skills: PHP, Javascript, MySQL, jQuery

• Developed multiple small custom websites for clients.
• Created basic e-shop solutions.
• Started using various Zend Framework components that were not utilized before.

Developer, later Team Leader, a-net group, a.s. —— _Jun 2009 - Jul 2009

Skills: PHP, Java, MySQL

• Worked on small website projects in PHP & Java.
• Advanced to a team lead role within a month.

Other

• Founded Brno PHP Meetup group and helped organizing first PHP Brno Conference.