Tobiáš Potoček (download CV)

• tobiaspotocek@gmail.com
• +420 604 880 671 (CZ)

You can find me on:

• LinkedIn
• GitHub
• StackOverflow
• Facebook

Experience

Senior Backend Engineer
Apify (since February 2024, Prague, Czechia)

• Joined the Platform team that maintains the very core components powering all of Apify.

Software Engineer
Deepnote (January 2024, Prague, Czechia)

• Took on an IC role to work on Deepnote's collaborative data science platform.
• After 2.5 weeks I handed in my resignation as Deepnote did not feel like a good fit for me.

Engineering Manager for Booking
Kiwi.com (August 2022 to December 2023, Prague, Czechia)

• Led three teams totaling 15 engineers (web, mobile, backend) managing Kiwi.com’s Booking page.
• Executed a reorg by dropping the Self-service teams and taking on a newly emerged backend team, creating a full-stack, vertical organization with clear accountability and ownership (all of that with zero backlash from engineers, covered in this public talk).
• Identified and pursued business opportunities through ROI-driven maintenance projects.
• Launched a 12+ month project to revamp core architecture for improved flexibility and personalization of the Booking page.
• Improved predictability and transparency of team delivery to meet management expectations.

Engineering Manager for Booking & Self-service
Kiwi.com (March 2020 to July 2022, Prague, Czechia)

• Managed four client teams totaling 20-25 engineers overseeing Kiwi.com’s Booking page and Self-service portal.
• Implemented a Google-like employee performance management system for the whole Kiwi.com’s SWE organization of 300 engineers (covered in this article and public talk)
• Fostered improved communication and architecture (client-driven API design, BFF) between frontend and backend teams, laying ground for future organizational restructures.
• Acted as a domain architect, overseeing design and decisions for all major projects.
• Initiated and influenced significant architectural overhauls in both verticals, navigating between business and technical needs.

Senior Frontend Developer
Kiwi.com (November 2019 to February 2020, Prague, Czechia)

• Supported web frontend devs as a member of Kiwi.com’s web platform team.
• Wrote a lot of documents but no code.

Software Engineer (L4)
Google (October 2017 to October 2019, Munich, Germany)

• Co-led the team, influencing decisions, managing projects, and mentoring juniors.
• Deprecated a major consent service (a service I previously deployed that became obsolete due to a strategy shift) by migrating multiple clients from across the globe to alternative solutions (Java, C++)
• Implemented a big chunk of a new native Android library for 1p consent screens

Junior Software Engineer (L3)
Google (2016 – 2017, Munich, Germany)

• Navigated the sensitive and nuanced area of privacy and consent inside Google’s User Data Collection team.
• Developed a scalable service (Java) aiding in GDPR compliance for key Google products.

Education

• Charles University in Prague
  Faculty of Mathematics and Physics (2013 – 2016)

  Master’s degree in Theoretical Computer Science (finished in September 2016)

• University of New Orleans
  Department of Computer Science (autumn 2015)

  Participating an in international exchange programme. I took classes in Distributed Systems, Planning in Artificial Intelligence and Fundamentals of Game Development.

• University of Bergen
  Department of Informatics (autumn 2014)

  Participating in the Erasmus exchange programme. I took classes in Cryptography, Social Web (analyzing data from social networks) and Semantic Technologies.

For full education and work experience please check out my LinkedIn profile.

My developer profile

By now, it is very likely that I have touched most of the aspects of a software engineer's life, at least on the conceptual level. And I seem to be a quick learner.

In my free time, I try to fill gaps in my skill set, focusing in particular on areas I'm bad at. That is not software engineering, that is piano playing.

Public activity

• Technical solutions that lead to great teams (talk) (2022)

  My talk on a DX Heroes meet up how I flipped the Conway's law: Push for the right technical solution and the team structure will follow.

• The Career Framework 2 years later: How it impacts our engineering culture at Kiwi.com (article + talk) (2022)

  A performance management system may sound dull, but it can have surprising impact on a company's engineering culture. Here is what happened at Kiwi.com in the 2 years that we've had it.
  
  You can also check out my talk on the same topic at Kiwi.com's Engineering culture meetup in Bratislava.

• Kiwi.com to offer a clear career path to every engineer (article) (2020)

  My report on launching the first ever performance management system for software engineers at Kiwi.com.

• Inbox Zero and Message Throttling in Slack (article) (2020)

  Leaving Google's advanced, email based communication culture was hard. This is how I dealt with it.

• Level generation techniques for platformer games (2015)

  A short paper that I wrote at the end of my stay in New Orleans as one of my assignments. It merely organizes and sums up different approaches that are used for procedural level generation in platformer games. Interestingly, many of those approaches involve practical use of machine learning techniques that I encountered during my studies.

Legacy engineering work

• LinkedPipes Application Generator (January – July 2016)

  My master’s thesis. I developed a web platform and a framework for automatic generation of simple web applications based on RDF linked data. The thesis is extending an ongoing research project LinkedPipes Visualization at my home faculty. The backend is powered by Scala with Play Framework, the frontend is using React.js with Redux. For more information please refer to the thesis text.

• tjfs (late 2015)

  During my stay at University of New Orleans we developed a high-availability distributed file system based on the original Google FS design. The file system is written completely in Java.

• Lumines (2015)

  JavaScript implementation of the legendary PSP game that you can try out on this page. It’s based on the bleeding-edge JS technologies like React.js, Flux and Immutable.js.