My Background
I have been building software for more than 20 years. These days I focus on platform work and tools that make other engineers more effective, including AI where it genuinely helps teams ship reliable software.
I see AI as most useful when you understand the problem well and know what good engineering looks like. I like working on systems, practices and tools that let people use AI in a clear, practical way, instead of treating it as a shortcut.
Outside of work I spend most of my time with my family, trying to teach my son useful skills and a healthy way to look at the world. I enjoy building things with my hands – from furniture to parts of house renovation – and recharging through travelling, games, long conversations with friends and reading fantasy, fiction and LitRPG stories.
Technical Skills
Technical expertise and technologies from my CV profile (same groups as the platform CV editor).
Technical Expertise
Developer Platforms & ToolingDeveloper Experience (DevEx)Product EngineeringFrontend ArchitectureEngineering ProductivityPlatform EngineeringInternal Developer PlatformsCI/CD & Release EngineeringEnd-to-End TestingReliability EngineeringObservability & TelemetryTechnical LeadershipSecurity Reviews & Threat ModelingMobile & Web ApplicationsSearch & Discovery SystemsContributed to engineering hiring, technical evaluation, and talent development efforts
Languages
TypeScriptPythonJavaRustHackPHPBashKotlinSwiftObjective-CC++
Frontend & Mobile
ReactReact NativeAndroidiOSHTMLCSS
Platform & Infrastructure
Node.jsGraphQLREST APIsThriftDockerLinuxAWSCI/CD Pipelines
Data & Search
PostgreSQLMySQLMongoDBMemcachedElasticsearchSolr
Developer Tooling
Build SystemsRelease AutomationE2E TestingTelemetry & Monitoring
Published from platform CV config via publish-rijavec.sh. Familiar technologies are shown in italics.
Experience
Meta
6 years 4 months- Senior Software Engineer - VS Code Platform & Developer Productivity
- Senior Software Engineer, Code Search & Mobile Ads
- Reduced Production Rollbacks: Founded the PRE (Performance, Reliability, and Efficiency) program, utilizing a 31-metric IDE health scorecard and automated release gates to cut rollbacks from 1 or 2 per week to a handful per quarter.
- Accelerated Release Cycles: Designed a parallelized release pipeline that cut extension deployment cycles from ~2 weeks to a few days, reducing hour-long monolithic builds to minutes.
- Automated Production Safety: Built a comprehensive telemetry stack for 200+ extensions featuring common event standards and automated regression alerting to unlock safe canary releases, staged rollouts, and automatic rollbacks.
- Optimized Ad Workflows: Shipped high-impact advertiser features across campaign management, media workflows, real-time analytics, and draft-to-publish optimization pipelines for the Ads Manager mobile app (8M+ active advertisers).
- Scaled Test Coverage: Built an org-wide E2E testing framework on headless VS Code with a custom mock-repo architecture, scaling automated test coverage from zero to 100% of the extension ecosystem.
TrustedHousesitters
5 years 3 months- Principal Engineer
- Lead Engineer
- Scaled Consumer Base: Successfully scaled the platform's user base from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of users, delivering an investment-ready product and winning the "Most Effective B2C App" award.
- Accelerated Search Performance: Boosted search page speeds by 200% by completely redesigning the Elasticsearch index, converting numeric fields to keywords, implementing folder-context routing, and performing in-memory tuning on hot index segments.
- Modernized Architecture: Transformed a legacy monolithic system into a highly scalable, containerized microservices architecture utilizing Docker and AWS.
- Accelerated Release Velocity: Built a comprehensive CI/CD pipeline alongside an ecosystem-wide E2E testing framework, significantly reducing deployment friction and accelerating feature delivery.
- Engineered Asynchronous Processing: Built a resilient distributed task queue and an automated media management pipeline to handle heavy, asynchronous processing of photos, videos, and multi-format documents.
Dixero International SA
1 years 3 months- Lead Software Engineer, Mobile & Platform
- Launched High-Volume Apps: Launched the TIMmusic mobile app (~50,000 MAU) and successfully rebuilt the second-generation Musicload.de platform to support over 4 million users.
- Architected Zero-Downtime Infrastructure: Designed a resilient, high-availability stack leveraging MongoDB, Apache Solr, HAProxy, Jetty, and Varnish clustering that sustained zero downtime during your tenure.
- Engineered High-Throughput Messaging: Built and productionized a high-volume push-notification infrastructure capable of serving millions of daily active users across iOS, Android, and Windows ecosystems.
- Optimized Media Ingestion: Developed robust audio-transcoding and content-delivery pipelines, enabling mass ingestion of major-label assets (Universal, Sony, Warner) with near-instant playback latency and no perceptible quality loss.
- Delivered Full-Stack Editorial Tools: Built a custom Python CMS and algorithmic merchandising ranking logic to streamline internal content curation and promotion workflows.
Delo d.d.
3 years 1 months- Full Stack Engineer
- Led Major Platform Redesigns: Directed the full-stack architecture and redesign of Delo.si and Slovenskenovice.si using PHP, Drupal, and JavaScript.
- Unified Network Authentication: Designed and implemented "Delo One," a cross-property single sign-on (SSO) and shared authentication service that unified logins across the publisher’s entire network of brands.
- Drastically Reduced Page Latency: Slashed page-load times by 30% through advanced SQL/MySQL database tuning, and by more than 50% via large-scale Varnish and Memcached caching integrations.
- Engineered Search & Archive Features: Built a custom digitized newspaper archive book-view experience and scaled platform search capabilities using Apache Solr.
ZootFly
1 years 3 months- Game Developer
- Delivered Production VoIP Subsystem: Engineered a real-time voice communication subsystem for the Guardiaris Military Vehicle Crew Simulator, deploying a production VoIP stack using Speex speech compression optimized over TCP/UDP.
- Integrated Complex Spatial Environments: Shipped full battlefield terrain integration for the complex Poček simulation environment, successfully embedding geographic and custom simulation content into the VBS2 engine.
- Authored High-Performance Gameplay Systems: Programmed core gameplay and training simulator features in C/C++ across specialized PC and console hardware targets.
Fortheia.si
4 years 8 months- Freelance Software Developer
- Built CMS/CRM foundation for next-generation web applications and white-label portals
- Delivered ToolEast project management modules and open-source ERP tooling for SMEs
- Designed route-optimisation algorithm reducing travelled distance and costs by ~60% on known routes
- Shipped transactional email and marketing campaign delivery system
IPKO Telecommunication
7 months- Software Developer
- Built internal form/questionnaire generators and intranet tooling for telecom operations
Slovenian Nuclear Safety Administration
10 months- Software Engineer
- Delivered intranet reporting modules and improved module development workflow for agency staff
Sonce.net
10 months- Junior Software Engineer
- Built PHP–Flash communication layer and shipped client marketing sites from design to production
