Lucas Kuzma

Summary

Engineering leader with decades of experience building products, architecting cloud-native, scalable platforms, and leading teams across the entire stack. Extensive product and platform engineering experience, both as a contributor and technical manager. Steeped in user experience and design as well as empirically driven business practices. Deep dives into web, mobile, back end, platform, 3D, DSP, AR, and AI/ML. Passionate about process, testing, and automation. Seeking a technically challenging leadership role.

Based in Berlin, location flexible. Can legally work in the US and EU.

Experience

• Director of Engineering

  TIER Mobility . Berlin . 2022 - present

  Managing product engineering for the TIER consumer app and its supporting back-end services, directly overseeing between four and six engineering teams.

  • Led, mentored, and grew an organization of talented managers and engineers.
  • Collaborated with other engineering leaders to champion and evangelize a technical vision.
  • Solicited input from key stakeholders across all of product and engineering.
  • Worked with senior management to define and communicate overall tech strategy and technical roadmap.
  • Worked with tech leads to ensure adherence to high standards and best practices.
  • Defined and monitored KPIs regarding product delivery, infrastructure, and ops performance.
  • Reviewed and helped to optimize engineering budget.
  • Served as a liaison with company-wide functional teams for infrastructure, data, and analytics.
  • Managed external vendors.

• Engineering Manager

  Fantasmo . Berlin . 2021 - 2022 (exit to TIER)

  Managed design and development for internal products and platforms as well as customer-facing APIs and SDKs at this Computer Vision startup.

  • Recruited and managed product and platform engineering teams.
  • Worked with ML teams to turn research into products.
  • Architected and oversaw the implementation of a globally-distributed, containerized, scalable AWS infrastructure.
  • Designed and implemented protocols for observability and data resiliency.
  • Interfaced with product and managed design resources while overseeing UI/UX efforts.
  • Spearheaded the design and development of internal mobile apps as well as public SDKs and APIs.
  • Helped develop protocols and metrics for mapping operations and created dashboards and management tooling to support them.
  • Championed documentation efforts and developed pipelines for continuous delivery and automated testing.
  
  
  • Terraform, ECS, SQS, Docker, Redis, Aurora, Fargate, Realm, MongoDB, Azure
  • iOS, Android, Django, FastAPI
  • New Relic, Cloudwatch, Sumo, Crashlytics

• CTO

  Jambl . Berlin . 2019 - 2020

  Led development on a heavily-trafficked music creation app, with rich community and gamification features.

  • Expanded and managed the engineering team.
  • Coordinated with product and design teams to establish needs and priorities.
  • Oversaw development for iOS, Android, and Linux.
  • Set up development process, including git flow, project board, and CI/CD.
  • Integrated CI/CD with Github, Slack, and Firebase.
  • Overhauled A/B testing and analytics processes.
  • Spearheaded extensive documentation efforts.
  • Refactored and authored numerous Swift components.
  • Architected and developed a Django back-end infrastructure with legacy Firebase integrations.
  • Built Google Cloud Platforms integrations.
  • Improved security and reliability.
  
  
  • GCP, Firebase
  • iOS, Android, Django
  • Bitrise, Realm

• Founder

  The Strange Agency . Los Angeles . 2009 - 2019

  Founded and managed a small consultancy developing and designing applications for web and iOS.

  Clients included Absolut, Adidas, Adobe, Altoids, Cocoon, Discover Card, Disney, Dwell Magazine, eBay, Ernst & Young, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Inktomi, Macromedia, Nabisco, Nickelodeon, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Progressive Insurance, Prudential, Redken, Revlon, Sealy, Tempur-Pedic, Victoria's Secret, and Yamaha.

  • Worked closely with teams at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, Huge, Sapient, TBWA\Chiat\Day, and theLab.
  • Recruited and managed small teams of engineers and designers.
  • Estimated LOE, timelines, and staffing needs.
  • Interfaced directly with Fortune 500 clients.
  • Created a series of boutique audio apps, generating over 1 million downloads.
  • Led the development of a large-scale, iOS application now installed in over 1000 retail locations.
  • Helped to architect, develop, and maintain a cloud-based, global e-commerce infrastructures for numerous brands.
  • Worked extensively with Magento, Oscar, and Shopify.
  • Engineered numerous integrations with payment processors, ERP systems, and other API vendors.
  • Used PhoneGap, React Native, as well as native Objective C and C++ to develop custom iPhone applications.
  • Developed web applications using Django, Flask, and Kohana.
  • Built components and applications using React and Angular.
  • Maintained Amazon AWS, Rackspace, and Heroku deployments and utilized Docker containers.
  
  
  • AWS, GCP, Heroku, Rackspace, OpenStack
  • iOS, Android, Django, Flask, Flash, Magento, Oscar, Shopify, React, React Native
  • New Relic, Cloudwatch, Pingdom, Crashlytics, Sentry

Academic Experience

• Lecturer (Part-Time)

  School of International Art . Beijing . 2022

  Designed and led an Introduction to Generative Design course, inspiring designers to learn to code through graphics programming.

• Adjunct Professor

  University of Southern California . Los Angeles . 2011 - 2012

  Taught intermediate game programming to graduate and undergraduate students.

• Researcher

  Universitat Pompeu Fabra . Barcelona . 2007

  Developed interfaces for concatenative synthesis with the Music Technology Group.

• Teaching Assistant

  University of California, Los Angeles . Los Angeles, CA . 2002 - 2004

  Courses: Design and Society, Senior Project, Design Culture, Creative Use of the Internet, Games and Art

Skills

• Languages

  Swift, Objective C, C++, C, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Processing, SQL

• Frameworks

  Angular, React, React Native, Django, Flask, FastAPI, CakePHP, Kohana

• Platforms

  iOS, macOS, AWS, GCP, Azure, Heroku

Education

• MS Machine Learning for Music Information Retrieval

  Universitat Pompeu Fabra . Barcelona, Spain

• MFA Design | Media Art

  University of California, Los Angeles . Los Angeles, CA

• BS Computer Science (AI minor)

  Case Western Reserve University . Cleveland, OH

• BA Philosophy

  Case Western Reserve University . Cleveland, OH

• Non-degree

  • Fast AI . Practical Deep Learning for Coders
  • Udacity . Introduction to Machine Learning