Bootstrapped an award-winning non-profit where 1,000+ tech experts give 10,000+ kids "job security at the age of 9". ✫ Best Social Impact Startup - Regional Finalist, Central European Startup Awards (2018 & 2020) ✫ Best Digital Skills in Education, European Commission (2018)

Product and engineering strategy, project rescue, and management consulting for startups, growth, and enterprise companies. Sometimes also writing code. Projects highlights: ◍ US construction corp (enterprise): AI agent platform to access construction project knowledge base ◍ Mrs Wordsmith (startup): AI x gaming edtech core platform APIs for language learning ◍ Queen Rania Foundation (nonprofit): language learning module for 2+ mil. learners on the largest MOOC in Arabic Industries: education, healthcare, legal, telecom, real-estate. Full portfolio: https://www.toptal.com/project-managers/resume/oana-ciherean

Product and delivery leadership of a large-scale telecom solution used by millions of users in Iraq. ◍ developed product roadmaps from conception to launch for an enterprise solution (15+ systems), including defining product & technical features, user stories, and acceptance criteria. ◍ oversaw 5 teams of 50+ members across product/project management, design, engineering, testing, devops and IT ◍ ensured quality, performance, reliability & security through adoption of engineering best practices, automation design & coordination of load & penetration testing ◍ resolved project stagnation and achieved department’s highest team velocity by pioneering cross-functional agile processes adopted company-wide ◍ guided growth of junior managers part of a newly introduced career track Tech stack: Angular, .NET Framework, C#, REST, oData, Creatio CRM & Process Automation, SAP BRIM, Clickhouse DB, Databases, Firebase, Flutter, PWA, RedHat SSO, Radius, GitLab

Redesigned org structure to transition from flat to hierarchy matrix the 50+ member R&D Department, and enabled 50% scale. ◍ designed matrix reporting structure, career tracks, role responsibilities, assessment KPIs for individual contributors and people managers in design, engineering, test, support, and project management ◍ designed performance management strategy to enable a culture of excellence and growth ◍ created change management plan to support iterative transition

Engineering lead for fintech solutions in banking and trading. ◍ Architected scalable financial data systems for banking and trading, ensuring accuracy, performance, and maintainability in a high-stakes regulatory environment. ◍ Designed and implemented data ingestion pipelines for real-time APIs and CSV uploads, normalizing and validating large volumes of data. ◍ Led end-to-end development of internal tools and back-end platforms, from requirements gathering with stakeholders to production deployment and support. ◍ Ensured security and compliance best practices were followed, especially around data handling, system access, and logging. ◍ Wrote clean, modular, and testable code following engineering best practices, including version control, code reviews, and documentation

Oversight of the studio’s mobile gaming division & production of 2 award-winning mobile games featured by Apple. ◍ managed the studio’s game production 20 member team across game developers, game designers, test engineers, 2D & 3D designers, and marketing ◍ decreased production lifecycle from 2 years to 10 months by designing a hybrid agile and waterfall development process ◍ led product and go-to-market strategy for breaking into the casual gaming market

Delivery of enterprise web platforms used in 40+ countries for the world's largest BioTech company. ◍ coordinated 4 teams across engineering, QA, design and customer support, to deliver 3 enterprise systems using a hybrid V-Model Waterfall and Agile Scrum development process ◍ managed release roadmaps of 3 web products and translated business requirements into engineering tasks ◍ designed architecture for software, REST APIs, data, search engine and business processes, that improved scalability by a factor of 7, decreasing infrastructure and maintenance costs ◍ developed automated testing strategy and designed test automation blueprint for end-to-end business flows Tech stack: .NET Framework, C#, JavaScript, SQL, HTML, CSS, ASP.NET MVC, REST, oData, Apache Solr, Microsoft SQL Server, Hadoop, Windows Services, Azure Service Bus, nUnit, Visual Studio Test Professional, IIS

Performance management strategy to foster culture change and growth of 130 software engineers. ◍ developed a culture of support and growth by leading the career management team of 30 senior engineers ◍ standardized new processes across onboarding, performance assessment, and project staffing at department level ◍ designed a new career track for L3 Support Engineering vertical at company level ◍ contributed to learning and development initiatives to cover skill gaps across projects

Full-stack engineering of medical data visualization platforms. ◍ designed and developed web systems and ETL components ◍ introduced quality processes for development through coding standards, and peer, and architectural reviews ◍ created architecture documentation using UML and the 4+1 view model ◍ mentored a team of 7 software engineers on their journey from junior to senior engineers ◍ drove technical interviews and improved the interviewing process Tech stack: .NET Framework, C#, JavaScript, SQL, HTML, CSS, ASP.NET WebForms, REST, Microsoft SQL Server, Windows Services, nUnit, Visual Studio Test Professional, IIS, TFS, Enterprise Architect

Led the engineering team for the 1st standalone version of UMT 360 (previously part of Microsoft Project and Portfolio Server). ◍ coordinated a team of 8 software engineers ◍ designed and developed workflows, OLAP cubes, and SharePoint apps ◍ translated business and customer requirements into product features and backlog ◍ collaborated with business stakeholder to conduct customer demos ◍ contributed to the system’s architectural design as a SharePoint farm ◍ introduced agile practices at company level, such as scrum, refactoring, peer/code reviews, or coding conventions ◍ designed and configured a custom software development lifecycle and CI/CD pipelines in Microsoft TFS Tech stack: C#, JavaScript, .NET Framework, Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation, Microsoft Project Server API, Microsoft SharePoint and SharePoint API, OLAP Cubes, Microsoft SQL Server.