Karoly Negyesi

Staff Backend Engineer

Birżebbuġa, Malta • karoly@negyesi.net • +1-778-859-2592

Profile Summary

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• Seasoned Staff Backend Engineer with a wealth of experience delivering complex solutions including multilingual websites and third-party integrations within fast-paced environments.

• Extensive technical skill set, with mastery in Drupal, proficiency in Docker and nginx technologies, with a focus on building performant, scalable and secure solutions.

• Impactful contributions during each phase of the Software Development Life Cycle, including requirements analysis, architecture design, implementation, testing, deployment and maintenance.

• Engaged collaborator with strong interpersonal skills and well versed in Agile methodologies, able to align cross-functional stakeholders with conflicting priorities to drive progress under aggressive time constraints.

• Drupal Core contributor for twenty years, first leader of its security team, inventor and maintainer of several subsystems including the migrate mechanism and the modernization of the fundamental hook system in the latest version.

Technical Skills

Domain of expertise: Drupal, Git (including developing Git tooling in Go), Linux CLI

Debugging Tools: xdebug and gdb

Languages: JavaScript, SQL, HTML, CSS, Go, Python

Frameworks & Libraries: AJAX, php-parser, Rector

Databases: MongoDB, MySQL, Redis

Cloud & DevOps: Docker, nginx (ssi, load balancing), Apache

Marketing Tools: Marketo, Impartner, Cvent

Work Experience

Smartsheet Inc. (remote) Bellevue, WA

Staff Backend Engineer Dec. 2015 - Jan. 2025

• Played a pivotal role within the Software Development Life Cycle, by architecting and maintaining scalable systems including a multilingual website and robust third-party integrations, and completely rewriting the marketing website of Smartsheet, while supporting the growth of the company from 180 employees to a 8.2B exit.

• Collaborated within a pluridisciplinary team including Marketing, Localization, Partners, Customer Support, Events, as well as the Director of Localization and the Global Partner Operations Team, maintaining a close communication and asking calibrated questions to remove bottlenecks and reach alignment.

• Engaged with partners to understand business use cases, gather technical requirements, and extract architectural significance for solution design. Conveyed challenges and opportunities in a clear and concise way, adapting the message to each audience’s specific technical literacy.

• Developed and maintained third-party integrations using Impartner, Cvent, Marketo, and Salesforce, thus ensuring seamless data synchronization across multiple platforms.

• Deployed green/blue updates utilizing Docker Containers with Nginx and PHP, ensuring zero customer downtime and optimal system performance.

• Maintained and enhanced the Smartsheet software by implementing periodic updates and optimizations, utilizing Git for source code management and New Relic and Kibana for real-time performance monitoring, ensuring continuous system efficiency without public-facing downtime for years.

• Crafted extremely complex reports within Drupal, employing advanced SQL features with limited documentation online, evidenced by only two StackOverflow questions and 12 web search results, thereby significantly deepening expertise with focused technologies and improving the decision-making process.

• Optimized application performance by profiling and identifying bottlenecks with New Relic and Datadog, and implementing changes that improved response times, thereby increasing customer satisfaction and engagement.

• Strengthened platform security by configuring internal access controls within Drupal and collaborating with the DrupalSecurity Team on resolving vulnerabilities we found, ensuring robust protection against unauthorized changes and consistently achieving favorable outcomes in department-led vulnerability assessments.

• Delivered technical presentations to the team, successfully translating stakeholder needs into actionable requirements, and maintained high engagement by asking calibrated questions, to ensure alignment and optimize delivery outcomes.

MongoDB Inc (remote) New York, NY

Drupal Evangelist May 2012 - Apr. 2015

• Integrated MongoDB with Drupalto significantly boost MongoDB's indexing capabilities, meeting Drupal's specific requirements and enabling its use within the Drupal framework, as endorsed by the CTO.

• Evaluated solutions by deploying suites of tests including unit tests, integration tests, and end-to-end tests using frameworks such as Selenium and PhpUnit, to achieve targeted code coverage.

Tag1 Consulting (remote) St. Petersburg, FL

Performance/ Edge Case Engineer Sep. 2011 - May 2015

• Contributed to the technical effort by architecting and implementing critical systems including a video selling website and an employee rating backend, utilizing Nginx SSI.

• Constructed a video selling platform for a UK TV Channel, optimizing functionality with NginxSSI under strict time and hardware limitations, and incorporating caching mechanisms and load balancing strategies to ensure a seamless video distribution experience, thus reducing server load significantly.

• Created very complex reporting queries for a new Drupal site, improving the efficiency and speed of data retrieval for a Fortune 500 company.

• Engineered solutions for performance problems by analyzing system bottlenecks, optimizing workflow processes, and revising performance metrics, thereby improving operational efficiency.

• Designed and configured Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment pipelines using Jenkins and Docker to automate builds and deployments, reducing deployment times significantly and increasing deployment frequency, while ensuring reliability with automated testing stages employing Selenium and PhpUnit.

• Assessed and improved code quality across numerous projects in adherence to coding standards, establishing coding standards and conducting thorough peer reviews, reducing bug rates and improving maintainability.

Examiner Inc (remote) Denver, CO

Senior Backend Engineer Sep. 2009 - May 2011

• Developed and launched a Quantcast Top 100 Website, utilizing MongoDB with Drupal in one of the first large-scale deployments of MongoDB , to efficiently handle the demands of an entirely uncacheable site.

NowPublic (remote) Vancouver, BC

Backend Engineer Dec. 2005 - Sep. 2009

• Maintained one of the first citizen journalism websites and implemented a trend analyzer and visualizer for the Twitter gardenhose, leading to a successful exit for the company.

Education

Technical University of Budapest - Classes in Engineering Informatics Budapest, Hungary - Sep. 1998 - Jun. 2001

Eötvös Loránd University - M.S. in Mathematics Education Budapest, Hungary - Sep. 1993 - Jun. 2000