Bogdan Cirlig

CTO

Portland, Oregon, United States23 yrs 10 mos experience
Highly Stable

Key Highlights

  • Founded 4 startups and raised venture capital.
  • Led engineering teams to deliver products to over 2 billion customers.
  • Recognized as a talent magnet in global hiring committees.
Stackforce AI infers this person is a seasoned leader in FinTech and AdTech with a strong focus on software engineering and product development.

Contact

Skills

Core Skills

Software EngineeringProduct DevelopmentStakeholder ManagementEntrepreneurshipCommunication

Other Skills

Team BuildingInfluencing Without AuthorityAgile MethodologiesAd TechPaymentsConsumer ProductsOnline AdvertisingPeople DevelopmentDistributed TeamsConflict ManagementRecruitingCross-functional Team LeadershipScrumExecutive LeadershipE-Commerce

About

Driven by curiosity and purpose, with a strong tech founder mentality, I love building exceptional teams that thrive on tackling the hardest problems and navigate ambiguity. 25+ years of progressive e-Commerce, Ad Tech and FinTech experience with a strong track record of success in high-growth, fast-paced environments. Founded 4x startups, raised venture capital and led large teams in big tech companies (Meta, PayPal) to deliver products to 2Bln+ customers, which has given me a keen sense of urgency, frugality, efficiency, and purpose. Equally capable at driving product innovation from 0 to 1 (PMF), scaling teams to 400+ and getting into the tech weeds when needed. Customer champion in leadership discussions, always striving to make the right trade-offs on their behalf. Results-oriented, I rally the teams to meet their commitments and deliver impact through effective use of engineering and product best practices. I encourage a culture of learning, experimentation, and continuous improvement, where failure is seen as an opportunity for growth. Recognized as talent magnet being part of Meta and PayPal's global hiring decision making committee. Outside of work I enjoy kitesurfing, snowboarding, road biking, winemaking and spending time with family and friends.

Experience

23 yrs 10 mos
Total Experience
2 yrs
Average Tenure
--
Current Experience

Rippling

Engineering @ Rippling

Nov 2023May 2025 · 1 yr 6 mos · San Francisco, California, United States · Hybrid

  • My role was the "CTO" for Benefits product vertical (within Rippling compound startup) and I will share a story about why this was so exciting.
  • hired across US+Bangalore and built the largest product engineering group in the company
  • pulled several product lines out of war rooms, stabilized, delivered customer delight and stakeholder sanity
  • drove engineering excellence path to green (SLO+KPIs) across 8 major tracks
  • built a leadership and Staff+ bench
  • re-organized the Benefits group to align with 5 year vision+strategy
  • improved recruiting / sourcing processes
  • +++ had a ton of fun doing it, countless challenges +++
  • this is the Benefits story: Every year, employers and employees spend over $5 trillion on work related benefits globally. From health insurance to saving for retirement, these benefits products guide families through some of the most important and impactful decisions in life. Despite the significance of these products and the dollars spent, the experience is still painfully antiquated, expensive, and confusing.
  • Rippling is building the first modern multi-sided marketplace that seamlessly connects brokers, employers, and employees with any benefit. Our platform powers discovery, purchase, and use of benefits products around the world. Our benefits vertical includes our Benefits Platform (recommendations, payments, and our benefits eligibility engine), our rapidly growing Benefits Marketplace of over 100 partners, and our natively-built Rippling Benefits Products.
Software EngineeringTeam BuildingStakeholder ManagementProduct Development

Career break

Professional development

Jul 2023Oct 2023 · 3 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

  • A well deserved sabbatical to cross one thing off my bucket list and become the 3rd generation winemaker in my family. I attended UC Davis Winemaker program to learn the science (spoiler: lots of chemistry), volunteered to help a few Santa Cruz winemakers and grape growers and got hands on experience. I learned to appreciate the complexity of the process that yields a seemingly simple beverage. Now ready to start my next adventure!

Meta

Senior Director of Engineering (Ad Tech | e-Commerce | Marketplace | Payments)

Feb 2020Jul 2023 · 3 yrs 5 mos · Menlo Park, California · Hybrid

  • Amazing opportunity to lead through the most intense wartime period in Meta's existence with frequent re-orgs, changes of strategy and direction, product sunsets, layoffs and team transformations. I focused on two major areas: Global Sales & Marketing (Ads) and Facebook App Commerce. Accomplishments include:
  • Co-created Meta's Business Support strategy that resulted in massive investment. Relocated the team to Singapore and continued to build it there.
  • Landed major Ads Manager features that led to $400MM incremental annual revenue while increasing the RoAS for advertisers
  • Created strategy to complete critical Diversity & Inclusion (DEI) training for 1000 eng organization
  • Built VP level partnerships and secured XFN support that led to meeting our app performance goals
  • Demonstrated vision and leadership by creating external partnerships that drove the much needed Young Adult external user acquisition that contributed to overall Daily Active Users (DAU)
  • Analyzed FB App Commerce product gaps and user sentiment and influenced (w/o authority) the leadership group to invest in "fixing" the integrity, listing quality and performance. this resulted in increased DAU and NPS
  • Led from the front and drove teams transformation from growth hacking to more DevOps and Engineering Excellence maturity level. Over the course of 6 months I recruited champions and implemented a program focused on SLAs, Test coverage, onCall. this resulted in aligning to highest standards the company expected us to meet (specific metrics)
  • Co-elevated my XFN peers by creating opportunities for them to build deeper customer segment understanding (UXR), facilitate Product Design to have a voice in strategy and road map execution
  • Certified interviewer with 100 leadership interviews per year and part of the Candidate Review decision making for Meta's wide tech role hiring decisions
  • Led my teams through several transitions and layoffs while providing immediate stability and direction
Stakeholder ManagementInfluencing Without AuthorityAgile MethodologiesAd TechSoftware EngineeringPayments+19

Paypal

Senior Director of Engineering (e-Commerce | Ad Tech | Payments)

Jul 2017Jan 2020 · 2 yrs 6 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

  • Part of Merchant business unit I led 300+ engineering organization across US, India, Singapore. I was accountable for ensuring engineering execution and operations generating $1 Bln+ in annual revenue across a suite of flagship SMB products including: Merchant Onboarding and activation, Business Debit Mastercard, FundsNow, Invoicing, Payouts, Cart recovery and conversion rate optimization, Shipping & Tracking, Compliance CIP in multiple countries, Marketplace seller onboarding.
  • For the company I've accomplished:
  • as Team builder: Created a top notch engineering culture and hiring outcomes, also part of the Bar Raiser steering committee to influence adoption of best practices across 23,000+ people organization.
  • as Talent magnet: actively involved in university hiring events across the country, Grace Hopper, hackatons/CalBears etc. I was entrusted to make spot offers at many of such events to recent college grads.
  • Under my leadership my teams (330 engineers) achieved:
  • 23% improved SLA uptime availability across production stacks, Zero Px or P0s, Unit Test coverage 90%+, Say-Do ratios of min 90%
  • <8% voluntary regrettable attrition rate, deeper engagement from individual engineers who believe in the vision and mission,
  • Hired more missionaries vs mercenaries to help us ship best customer products, committed to continuous experimentation and measuring results in a true Lean Startup manner albeit inside a public large company.
  • Actively participated in strategic technical architecture decisions as well as lending insights to my engineering teams on best practices in building and scaling api platforms and end user experiences.
Stakeholder ManagementInfluencing Without AuthorityAgile MethodologiesLeadershipAd TechSoftware Engineering+20

Alphaflow

CTO, Co-founder (FinTech | Marketplace | YCombinator W16)

Apr 2015May 2017 · 2 yrs 1 mo · San Francisco, Bay Area

  • AlphaFlow (YCombinator W16) is the first and fastest-growing automated real estate investment service. The service combines advanced data analytics and innovative technology to provide investors with sophisticated investment management at affordable prices. (BusinessWire: https://goo.gl/jmogpE)
  • First engineer-founder, built and launched initial product in < 6 weeks
  • Went from $0 to $2.1M in venture funding and from 0 to 2,000 customers in < 1 year
  • Hands-on recruiting the initial Engineering team (StackOverflow, Linkedin, AngelList, own network)
  • Interfaced with stakeholders and buffered ebbs and flows, shielding the ENG team daily
  • Implemented Agile/Scrum, JIRA metrics to measure the health and efficiency of the team
  • Promoted practices via daily code reviews, active in tech architecture, continuous integration
  • Made all Buy vs. Build decisions, analyzed ROI, worked with external technology vendors
  • Created ENG culture based on recognition, stake in the product, learning from failures, no ego no politics, embracing change and encouraging learning and experimentation, coached and mentored
  • Increased code quality 12x by promoting Test Driven Development & Test Automation
  • Wrote API specs and helped partners integrate the crowdfunding deal syndication
  • Orchestrated Pen testing and established data security classification policies
  • Technologies used: Node.js, Javascript, Angular, Mongo, Postgress, Heroku, AWS, EC2, S3, CloudFront, HTML5, Microservices, RabbitMQ, REST, APIs, JIRA, CodeShip. Stripe, Plaid, private NPM, Github, Distributed Systems, Fullstack Software Architecture
Stakeholder ManagementInfluencing Without AuthorityAgile MethodologiesLeadershipSoftware EngineeringPayments+20

Adperk

Vice President of Engineering (SaaS | Ad Tech)

Mar 2013Apr 2015 · 2 yrs 1 mo · San Francisco Bay Area

  • Rebuilt the engineering and product which resulted in an acquisition offer from Coupons Inc.
  • Led the architecture and implementation of RESTFul APIs
  • Reduced operating cost by 65% and improved scalability by a factor of 15x
  • Made Build vs. Buy decisions and wired up commercial APIs such as Google Analytics, keen.io API, Facebook and twitter APIs and more to collect and report video interactions
  • Formulated the product vision and acted as interface between stakeholders and engineers
  • Implemented Agile/Scrum, JIRA metrics to measure the health and efficiency of the team
  • Technologies used: Node.js running on Heroku, MongoDB, Redis, KOA.js & Express.js / Websockets, Angular.js, AWS, EC2, S3, CloudFront, Fullstack Software Architecture
Stakeholder ManagementInfluencing Without AuthorityAgile MethodologiesSoftware EngineeringConsumer ProductsPeople Development+18

Humanconcepts, a saba company

Principal Architect (SaaS HR Analytics)

Feb 2010Sep 2013 · 3 yrs 7 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

  • I spearheaded the technical roadmap, architecture and all technical implementation decisions that led to our successful SaaS product launch and 3 years later to an acquisition by Saba Corp for high double digit $MM.
  • Rebuilt the ENG team (25+) and technology stack, worked across functional global teams
  • Architected a SaaS platform that ran across 3 continents and handled F1000 customers such as AmericanAir, Target, Walmart, British Telecom
  • Worked closely with business stakeholders to identify feature sets and provide cost-benefit analysis to enable ROI estimates
  • Led the Mobile application initiative that delivered native cloud application support for IPhone (iOS) and Blackberry
  • Implemented a solid Engineering process based on Agile/SCRUM and continuous integration
  • Co-inventor on patent "Method and System for controlling Data Access to organizational data maintained in Hierarchical charts" http://www.google.com/patents/US20130232539
  • Technologies used: C#, .Net, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, JavaScript, JIRA, Confluence, Blackduck Codescan, SaaS
Stakeholder ManagementAgile MethodologiesSoftware EngineeringConflict ManagementCommunicationScrum+5

Rovi (former macrovision)

Enterprise Architect, TV & Digital Media (AdTech)

Jan 2009Mar 2010 · 1 yr 2 mos · San Jose, CA

  • 55 Million IoT consumer devices such as TVs (Samsung, Sony) and set top boxes (Comcast) were sending consumer interaction data every day to us. I was tasked to consuming all that data and implementing Digital Ad targeting back to those devices. Played key role in the architecture and solutions to deliver Rovi's next interactive TV Guide real time advertising platform.
  • Made critical design decisions and guided a multi-national technical team to implement a world class interactive rich media ad experience into the next generation TV set top boxes from Samsung, Sony and other major players.
  • Evaluated several technology providers such as Google/DoubleClick, AdTech, OpenX and so on. Lead technical evaluation talks and provided comparative analysis among various vendors.
  • Provided critical guidance in implementing robust ad tracking and reporting mechanism from over 55 mil consumer TV devices back to Rovi Advertising server farm
Stakeholder ManagementSoftware EngineeringPeople DevelopmentConflict ManagementCommunicationScrum+4

Zilpy.com

Tech Co-founder (Real Estate Analytics)

Nov 2006Mar 2009 · 2 yrs 4 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

  • Envisioned, built and launched the most comprehensive US Rental market analytics platform.
  • Hands on coding, architected the backend and database storage and proprietary Rent Estimate algorithms.
  • Actively worked on partnering with real estate companies such as Zillow and Trulia.
  • Implemented new www.zilpy.com website 100% on node.js platform using Twitter Bootstrap Ui templates, ExpressJS, MongoDB and Redis. The whole stack runs on Heroku and it's fully integrated with github for push deployments. Exposed RESTFul API / JSON for some client side operations.
  • I have used the following frameworks to make this happen:
  • nodejs/expressjs/jade/mongoose models
  • integrated backbone/knockback to manage server API model hydration
  • used Redis caching to store and manage user sessions across several servers
  • used restler and restify for ajax client side xml api calls (into Zillow API)
  • used moment.js and numeral.js for client side formatting
  • html5 / twitter bootstrap / jQuery / AJAX for UI work
  • used passport.JS for Facebook/google/local authentication strategies
  • secured the REST API using passport oAuth 2.0
  • created tiger-geocoder open source geocoder package to provide address resolution
  • deployed postgres geocoding database
  • used postmark to send mail from within the application
  • integrated node-time for heroku monitoring
Software EngineeringPeople DevelopmentConflict ManagementCommunicationScrumStartups+5

Advertising.com (an aol company)

Lead Enterprise Architect (AdTech)

Oct 2005Oct 2006 · 1 yr

  • Microsoft .net Tech/lead for the Ad Server initiative. Tech leading a team of 15 software engineers to deliver Advertising.com's next Ad Serving platform that handles 150,000 transactions per second (no typo) and runs across hundreds of servers in n-Tiers.
  • Heavily used, and hands-on UML tools such as Enterprise Architect, C#, .Net 2.0, MSMQ, XML/XPath, Threading/Thread pools, Serialization, OOP/Polymorphism, Microsoft Application Blocks, patterns such as dirty marker, object factory, etc, advanced .net concepts such as CLR tuning. Full SDLC management including nUnit/TDD approach, automated builds, defect tracking.
Software EngineeringCommunicationDistributed SystemsCreativity and Innovation

Chase education finance

Lead Software Engineer (FinTech)

Jan 2004Oct 2005 · 1 yr 9 mos

  • Tech lead on .Net platform. Successfully led the implementation on several projects. Managed resources, analyzed, architectured, planned, implemented and provided technical guidance.
  • Used C#,.Net,Remoting,XML Web Services,SOAP/XML,Crystal Reports,Multi threading to implement a corporate print and delivery system.
  • Used UML/Visio, flow charts, sequence diagrams, use cases, MSF/MOF to deliver quality documentation in all project life cycles. Used Waterfall/Spiral methods. Also used SCRUM process for development sprints.
  • Designed databases under MS SQL, implemented ER diagrams, relational normalization for real time web applications.
  • Led the www.SunTech.com project implementation and integrated with ViaServ mainframe through .Net webservices.
  • Led the XML Web Services architecture and implementation for Private Education loans product.
  • Worked under tight deadlines, mitigated project risks, resource conflicts and project stress.
Software EngineeringCommunicationCreativity and Innovation

Omega world travel

Lead Software Engineer (Online Travel Tech)

Feb 2001Jan 2004 · 2 yrs 11 mos

  • Led the technological migration from Java/EJB to .Net n-Tier XML webservices as Enterprise Architect; Designed and implemented Cruise Business framework polymorphism using .Net classes and interfaces (over 50 complex multi-array classes).
  • Designed high performance n-tier .Net enterprise systems that scale out as stateless XML webservices. Developed 3 commercial webservices using .Net and SQL Server 2000 and deployed them onto production servers.
  • Implemented a multi-threaded Cruise booking engine connected through Sabre and Gallileo GDS systems (over 25,000 lines of C++.Net / C# code as XML Webservices in less than 6 months).
  • Developed Cruise Cache and Booking Engine Databases on SQL Server 2000, ER Diagrams, wrote stored procedures with T-SQL and designed the data models.
  • Implemented dynamic plugin loading and class bulding in XML webservices by using Reflection namespace
  • Analyzed, planned and allocated resources for various projects .Net using Microsoft Project.
Software EngineeringCommunicationCreativity and Innovation

Education

Stanford University Graduate School of Business

Executive Education (LEAD) — Corporate Innovation

Jan 2019Jan 2021

Y Combinator

Jan 2015Jan 2016

Romanian - American University (www.rau.ro)

Master of Business Administration - MBA — Computer/Information Technology Administration and Management

UC Davis Continuing and Professional Education

Winemaker — Viticulture and Enology

Jan 2021Jan 2023

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