Mihai Balaci

CEO

Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands21 yrs 1 mo experience

Most Likely To SwitchAI ML Practitioner

Key Highlights

Led the development of next-gen AWS IDE products.
Built AI-first engineering teams for enhanced productivity.
Drove innovation in GenAI tooling for AWS.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a SaaS leader with expertise in AI-driven development and site reliability engineering.

Contact

Skills

Core Skills

LeadershipGenaiAwsManagementSre

Other Skills

CommunicationSite ManagementBusiness DevelopmentTeam DevelopmentProduct LaunchBusiness StrategyAnalytical SkillsMachine LearningAWS IDE productsAWS CloudShellAWS Cloud9AWS CloudEditorIncident ResponseAlert APIsDistributed Tracing

About

As the Managing Director & Site Lead of the Amazon Development Center Netherlands, I am responsible for building and leading the next generation development tooling for AWS customers. With over 18 years of experience in software engineering, SRE/DevOps, and business development, I have the experience and vision to drive innovation and excellence in the rapidly evolving field of GenAI. I am developing AI first engineering teams striving to deliver 10x the output of a conventional team through spec driven development and engineering workflows. My teams are part of the AWS Platform Experience organization, which focuses on harnessing AI to deliver an enjoyable and efficient developer experience on AWS. My group is responsible for building and maintaining AWS IDE products and public services, including AWS CloudShell, Cloud9, CloudEditor, the full CodeSuite portfolio (CodePipeline, CodeArtifact, CodeDeploy, CodeConnections, CodeCommit, CodeBuild), as well as AWS DeviceFarm. My group collaborates closely with various AWS teams and partners across locations such as Amsterdam, Berlin, New York, and Seattle to provide scalable and dependable solutions for our customers.

Experience

Amazon web services (aws)

2 roles

Managing Director & Site Lead Amazon Development Center Netherlands

Promoted

Apr 2022 – Present · 3 yrs 11 mos · Hybrid

I am the Managing Director for the Amazon Development Center Netherlands BV and the site lead of the Amazon Development Center in Amsterdam.
My teams are part of the The Next Gen Development Tools organisation which was created in response to the need for AWS to prioritise and build Gen AI Tooling. In the long term, Gen AI will completely change how software is created and leveraged. We use GenAI to build the next generation development tools in order to offer our customers a delightful experience (Amazon Q IDE plugins and others)

CommunicationSite ManagementBusiness DevelopmentTeam DevelopmentManagementProduct Launch+5

Head Of Engineering

Apr 2022 – Nov 2022 · 7 mos · Hybrid

My teams' goal: Build the next generation development tooling.
We are building the AI/ML capabilities to enable a delightful and more productive coding experience.
I am responsible for AWS IDE products and services:
AWS CloudShell
AWS Cloud9
AWS CloudEditor
Amazon Q and AWS Toolkit for various IDEs like IntelliJ, PyCharm, VScode, Visual Studio...
I manage development teams in Amsterdam/Netherlands and Seattle/USA.
We help customers to develop for and on AWS by providing them with efficient tools: IDEs, debuggers, and development environments meant to accelerate their development cycle and boost productivity.

CommunicationBusiness DevelopmentManagementLeadershipBusiness StrategyAnalytical Skills+2

Gitnation

GitNation Committee Member

Dec 2020 – Present · 5 yrs 3 mos · https://www.devopsjsconf.com/

Voluntary Part-Time Work--
GitNation Program Committee Member
I am helping organizing the conferences. I help selecting speakers and submitted presentations & create the schedule for the upcoming conferences

Communication

Booking.com

2 roles

Sr. Engineering Manager - Site Reliability

Jul 2020 – Mar 2022 · 1 yr 8 mos

Leading the TechOperations @ Booking (Product Performance, Reliability, and the Observability)
Head of SRE @ Booking.com
Responsible for Booking Tech group extension to Bucharest - România; office opening and design the remore work between Amsterdam and Bucharest
Managing SRE Managers, Engineering Managers, Product Managers for the following internal projects:
Responsible for the cost center budget (CAPEX, OPEX) management, and external contracts
Responsible for Incident Response implementation & 24/7 on-call support setup for booking.com along with on-call policy definition.
Observability @ Booking.com
Implementing Distributed Tracing
In-house service registry/catalog development
In-house runtime configuration management development
Booking & Reservation engines
Internal Service Health & SLI/SLO aggregation services
Internal Chaos service used for random AZ failovers for all Booking services
Ongoing capacity testing for all booking.com critical services
Highly involved in scaling-up the organization & the hiring process, I am the hiring manager for a few roles (Core SRE, Sr SRE, Lead SRE, Core Developer, Sr Developer, Principal developer/SRE and Architects)

CommunicationManagementLeadershipAnalytical SkillsSRE

Sr. Manager Software Development

Dec 2019 – Apr 2022 · 2 yrs 4 mos

Leading the Product Performance and Reliability
Head of SRE @ Booking.com
Managing SRE Managers, Engineering Managers, Product Managers for the following internal projects:
Responsible for Incident Response & Alert APIs implementation along with 24/7 on call support setup for booking.com
Responsible of closing & maintaining external vendors contracts (6+ Million$ contracts)
Message transport services (email and push notifications)
Image services
Service Directory
In-house runtime configuration management
In-house service registry
Booking & Reservation engines
Internal Service Heatlh & SLI/SLO aggregation services
Internal Chaos service used for random AZ faiolvers for all Booking services
General Job Responsabilities:
o Manage a multi million $ yearly budget
o Managing SRE Managers, Engineering Managers, Product Managers involved in different projects
o Delivering 99.99% service reliability
o Build SRE Culture within Booking.com
o Define & implement SLI-SLO-SLA's for all services
o Implement Error Budget
o Building Chaos engineering practices & tooling across Booking.com services
o Provide mentoring to team members
o Develop and implement DevOps best practices while maintaining agility – stress automation of operational activities (IAC Mentality)
o Optimize product/Infrastructure design and architecture
o Integrating the newest technology to accelerate our delivery pipeline
o Recruitment for technical positions – SRE / Development
o Evaluations, team meetings, 1:1's, defining OKR's & SMART Objectives
o Focus on team members professional development - career path

CommunicationManagementLeadershipBusiness StrategyAnalytical SkillsSRE

Adobe

Manager Site Reliability Engineering

May 2017 – Dec 2019 · 2 yrs 7 mos · Bucharest, Romania

Adobe Digital Experience
We are building one of the largest data platforms in the cloud
o Managing SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) Teams involved in different projects
o Successfully delivered Adobe Cloud Platform GA
o Delivering 99.99% service reliability
o Build SRE Culture
o Define & implement SLI-SLO-SLA's for all services
o Implement Error Budget & Toil Work
o Introduced the concept of Wargames and Chaos engineering practices
o Provide mentoring to team members
o Develop and implement SRE best practices while maintaining agility – stress automation of operational activities (IAC Mentality)
o Optimize product/Infrastructure design and architecture
o Integrating the newest technology to accelerate our delivery pipeline
o Part of several agile scrum sprints cross-geo
o Define and implement the Embedded SRE Model within the engineering/product development teams
o Recruitment for technical positions – SRE / Dev
o Evaluations, team meetings, 1:1's, defining OKR's & SMART Objectives
o Coordinate with remote stakeholders ( US, Europe, Asia)
o Focus on team members professional development - career path
Technologies we use:
AWS and Azure as cloud platforms, K8s, Terraform, Prometheus, Vagrant, Packer, Vault, Consul, Mesos/Marathon, Git, Mysql, Postgresql, MongoDB, Redis, Cassandra, RabbitMQ, Kafka, Hadoop, Zookeeper, ETCD,HAProxy, Nginx, OpenTSDB, Grafana, NewRelic, Splunk, Jenkins, SaltStack, Ansible, Python, Bash, Java, Scala, Ruby

CommunicationManagementAnalytical SkillsSRE

Ubisoft

2 roles

Manager IT Operations - Asia Pacific

Sep 2016 – Jun 2017 · 9 mos

Achievements:
Built the APAC Online DevOps teams
Develop KPI and data-driven systems availability reporting
Ensure a high-level of uptime and quick service restoration in case of incidents
Design & Manage Capacity allocation of APAC squads/teams for all ongoing project Ubisoft has in the region following Agile Scrum P.M Methodology
Deliver games from Development/Project Status to Online/Release
Deliver each game infrastructure for Online
Design / Assign / Track progress using Jira based on Agile Methodology
Define & Implement Standards
Design Process Improvements
Downtime of Online service reflects in full accountability for the revenue stream within the business
Implementing On-Call Policy
o Managing teams in Singapore, Shanghai, Chengdu
o Consult/collaborate with HR in evaluating team performance
o Recruitment for technical positions – Sysadmins, DBA's, App Specialists, DevOps
o Manage staff of Admins, DevOps and application specialists
o Appraisals, Evaluations, team meetings, 1:1's
o Handle launch season war rooms and emergency escalations
o Coordinate and organize squads
o Coordinate teams in order to support every Ubisoft game Launch
o Old games transition or decommission process
o Produce monthly utilization/ capacity planning reports
o Coordinate and build the IT Managers role & responsabilities
o Manage War Room sessions (Game Launch dedicated sessions)
o Perform Budget/Labor & Forcast analysis every month
o Focus on squads members professional development - career path

CommunicationManagementAnalytical Skills

DevOPS Manager - EMEA

Sep 2015 – Sep 2016 · 1 yr

Leading a follow the sun team of SMEs providing operational support for all online activities.
Achievements:
Being part of AAA successful games Ubisoft launched (Tom Clancy's The Division, The Crew, Rayman Adventures, Ghost Recon Wildlands)
Successfully reached all the metrics, SLA and KPI targets
Started the adoption of DevOps mindset
Responsibilities:
o Responsible for leading EMEA technical Linux team
o Involved in the hiring process and career path definition
o Set and monitor adherence to high operational standards;
o Manage rotation of schedules and staff to ensure a follow-the-sun structure;
o Lead operations systems and processes improvement to accommodate the massive growth of Ubisoft systems;
o Ensure a high-level of uptime and quick service restoration in case of incidents;
o Develop KPI and data-driven systems availability reporting;
o Track changes and incidents occurring on the systems under our responsibility and generate problem records for the reoccurring incidents;
o Monitor systems health to proactively avoid any possible downtime;
o Fuel automation efforts to reduce manual operations and increase overall efficiency;
o Provide operational perspectives on all aspects of the service architecture and design;
o Managing more than 8000 servers (bare metal + VM's + Amazon EC2 instances)
Technologies we used:
VMware, OpenStack, AWS Services, Chef, Salt, Ansible, MySQL NDB Cluster + Percona, Couchbase, MongoDB, Memcache, Redis, Apache, Nginx, Tomcat, Jenkins, Varnish, Jboss, PHP-FPM, RabbitMQ, Kafka, PowerDNS, Zabbix, Grafana, Flume, Logstash, Kibana, Elasticsearch, Git, SVN, Vagrant/Packer, Jira, ServiceNow

CommunicationManagementAnalytical Skills

Temperfield

Senior IT Consultant

Sep 2010 – Jan 2016 · 5 yrs 4 mos · Bucharest, Romania

Working with Temperfield collaboratively for different Implementation projects.
Achievements:
Successfully implemented and maintained Vmware VDI Virtual Desktop Infrastructure for one of the biggest retailer in Romania (Leroy Merlin)
Implemented and maintained Windows Server Active Directory Infrastructure
o Being part of the solution design
o Participated to the implementation stages
o On-demand support for the delivered solution
Technologies used:
VMware Vsphere, VDI, Horizont, Microsoft Active Directory, DHCP, DNS, GPO, Linux / Unix, Pfsense firewall, Cisco technologies

Ibm

Unix / Tivoli (ITNM) Software Engineer

Sep 2009 – Sep 2015 · 6 yrs · Bucharest, Romania

Member of the EMEA team ensuring continuous premium software support for IBM Telecom and Bank customers. Supporting and implementing Tivoli monitoring suite solutions for customers infrastructure in the live production environment.
Achievements:
Successfully implemented and supported Tivoli products for various Telecom companies (TIM Italia, Vodafone UK, O2 UK)
Successfully reached all the metrics, SLA and KPI targets
Being part of a solid service delivery team
Teaching Linux classes for new engineer teams
Responsibilities:
o Support IBM customers process following ITIL framework
o Respect SLA, KPI, metrics
o Leading the team from the technical perspective
o Diagnosing and resolving software problems or conflicts, for a large range of customers with different support agreements to including business critical environments
o Assisting the customers, via mail, phone, remote connection, while installing, upgrading/updating or customizing the products
o Recreating customer environments in a lab environment for troubleshooting purposes
o Training and mentoring technical support team members
o Involved in hiring process for technical engineers
Technologies used:
Tivoli Netcool Omnibus 7.1 / 7.2 / 7.2.1 / 7.3 / 7.4 / 8.1
Tivoli Netcool Webtop / Webgui 2.2 / 7.3 / 7.4
Tivoli Netcool Network Manager IP 3.7 / 3.8 / 3.9 /4.1
Tivoli Netcool Configuration Manager 6.3 / 6.4 / 6.4.1
Experience with Mimic Network Simulator 12.10
Responsable for Vmware Vsphere Testing Laboratory infrastructure / DRS / vMotion / HA
Windows 2008 / 2012 AD, AIX 5.3 / 6.1 / 7.1, Redhat / CentOS / Suse Linux, Sun Solaris 10

S.c integral-it s.r.l

Infrastructure Engineer

May 2008 – Sep 2009 · 1 yr 4 mos · Craiova

Member of a consultancy IT team
Achievements:
Hardware/Software Infrastructure optimization for a chemical manufacturing company
Implementation of Microsoft Operation Manager (MOM)
Implementation/administration of BitDefender Enterprise Security
Implementation of OTRS Ticketing System
Responsibilities:
o Desing and implement solutions to accommodate customers needs
o Manage customers infrastructures
o Microsoft Exchange2003/2007 Servers
o Active Directory 2003/2008 infrastructure
o Responsible for implementation of OTRS Ticketing System
Technologies used:
Microsoft Active Directory, DHCP, GPO, Cognos, Microsoft Dynamics, VPN, IpSec, Cisco, HP, APC, OTRS

Matrix technology ag

System Engineer

Sep 2007 – Jun 2008 · 9 mos · Munich Area, Germany

Part of the IT team providing services to several german and global customers like BMW Group and Boston Consulting Group
Achievements:
o Being part of such a dynamic & skilled team was already an achievement
o Managed to learn and work with new technologies
o Customizing Groundwork OpenSource professional Monitoring System
o Implementation of PfSense Firewall cluster solution
Responsibilities:
Implementation of Groundwork OpenSource professional Monitoring System
Administration & maintenance of Groundwork
Maintenance & surveillance of Asigra Televolting Advanced Back-up Solution
Administrate OpenBSD and PfSense (FreeBSD) firewall based on PF
Implementation of PfSense cluster solution
Technologies used:
Nagios, Linux, BSD, Asigra, PfSense, Apache, SSH, Postfix