Ivan Panov - Engineering Manager

Munich, Germany

Experience

Apr 2022 - Present

3 years 9 months

Engineering Manager

Commercetools GmbH

Driving AI transformation of the company
Scouting for business areas to be improved by AI
Leading development of AI products
Driving education of people in AI
Organizing educational AI events
Further development of company products
Team management
Technical leadership

Oct 2021 - Jul 2022

10 months

Conversational AI Consultant

Closr GmbH

Consulting the company about conversational AI tools
Implemented a framework for integrating conversational logic with the business logic

Jan 2020 - Mar 2022

2 years 3 months

Principal Architect (Conversational AI)/Team Lead

Health Care Systems GmbH

Led a 9-person team (8 internal + 1 external): hiring, coaching, building team culture, resolving conflicts, setting and monitoring OKRs
Improved development process including definition of done, definition of architecture, standard operating procedures
Adjusted development process to comply with medical software regulations
Improved page loading time by 80%
Introduced technical debt review process
Improved discussion culture and organised team events
Led a 5-person team for mobile application: owned system architecture and non-functional requirements (data privacy, security, auditability, observability, healthcare software requirements, DevOps)
Set development process: definition of done, continuous documentation, coding style, branching model, code review criteria, test-driven development
Planned team capacity, task priorities and timeline with product owner
Organised and moderated design discussions and team events
Owned system architecture and documentation for digital AI assistant: non-functional requirements and DevOps
Improved development process via definition of done and branching model

Jan 2018 - Nov 2018

11 months

Founder & CTO

Brainymenu

Developed business idea together with a non-technical co-founder
Implemented MVP of AI chatbot for restaurants
Interviewed potential customers and managed pilot project in a restaurant with real users

Jul 2017 - Dec 2019

2 years 6 months

Lead Software Engineer Conversational AI

Materna SE

Implemented prototype for conversational AI platform (pre-sales) and participated in offer preparation as technical expert
Created system architectures and owned non-functional requirements
Built, coached and scaled project teams up to 11 developers
Established agile development process and implemented critical system components
Led technical workshops for customers and guided clients through chatbot and cognitive search features
Created proofs of concept and participated in offers preparation
Organised workshops with sales and business development to identify AI use cases and adjust company strategy
Led PoC implementation and scouted AI technologies
Participated in offer preparation and customer workshops for sales AI assistant; implemented proofs of concept, system architecture, cloud infrastructure and CI/CD
Improved build and deployment process (CI/CD) for microservices; set up test, staging and production environments on OpenShift and log aggregation
Organised and moderated workshops for Service Desk AI chatbot; contributed to system architecture, led cloud migration, evaluated technologies, coached junior developers, set up CI/CD and QA for AI components
Implemented Kafka connectors and contributed to CI process for data integration projects

May 2014 - Jun 2017

3 years 2 months

Senior Software Engineer / Team Lead Deputy

Teradata Marketing Applications / Mapp Digital

Full-stack software development for SaaS multichannel messaging systems: design, implementation, refactoring
Drove cross-team architecture discussions and introduced coding standards and API conventions
Reworked frontend architecture to increase development speed and system reliability
Took interim team leader role for 1.5 months and organised team events
Automated deployment to reduce manual work

May 2013 - Mar 2014

11 months

Software Engineer

dotplot GmbH

Full-stack development of cloud-based data analysis platform: statistics, machine learning, visualization and reporting

Aug 2011 - May 2013

1 year 10 months

Solution Designer

Deutsche Telekom AG

Designed and implemented data quality and master data management platform
Mentored students

Nov 2009 - Apr 2010

6 months

Junior Software Engineer

Minkle GmbH

Full-stack development of a crowdsourcing portal

Summary

Several years of experience leading AI projects (including large projects for major companies such as Volkswagen, KfW Bank)
Managed budgets
Built teams
Developed concepts
Led development processes
Coordinated involved companies and departments
Applied AI to optimize business processes
Gathered problems and ideas from business experts
Developed proofs of concept (PoCs)
Led product development
Created an AI strategy for the company in collaboration with the business development department
Promoted further training on current AI topics
Gave internal presentations
Conducted workshops for clients
Organized an AI hackathon
Pragmatic leadership style with a strong focus on business needs
"Do more with less"
"Maximize learning": Quick and cost-effective testing of business hypotheses with prototypes before making big investments.
"Minimalistic Engineering": Every complexity in a system must be justified by a business need. No overengineering, no "premature optimization", no unnecessary features, no unjustified expenses.

Skills

Architecture: Oop, Fp, Clean Code, Software Architecture, System Design
Prog. Languages: Java, Js/ts, Python
Ai: Llm Based Systems (Prompt Engineering, Rag, Agents, Benchmarking), Intent-based Chatbots (Ibm Watson Assistant, Rasa, Dialogflow), Machine Learning (Keras/tensorflow, Scikit-learn), Nlp (Nltk)
Cloud: Aws, Gcp, Azure
Frontend: React.js, Vue.js, Angular, Html/css
Backend: Node.js, Spring Boot
Databases: Sql (Postgres, Mysql Etc.), Nosql (Mongodb, Firestore Etc.)
Qa: Mocha, Selenium, Junit Etc.
Devops: Containers, Kubernetes, Ci/cd, Iaac, Observability
Development Methodologies: Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Lean Startup, Customer Development