John Badali

Engineering Leader of one of Sinch's core Email offering, Mailgun.

Key Responsibilities:

• Directly manage 6 engineers on the Sending Pipeline team focused on building scalable systems that support email delivery at massive scale.
• Supervise two managers: one overseeing the frontend stack for Mailgun’s application, the other managing the Reputation engineering team (full-stack).
• Oversee and coordinate the development of key frontend, backend, and system components across teams, facilitating project delivery and cross-functional communication.
• Delivered major performance improvements through careful analysis of system bottlenecks and implementation of targeted optimizations.
• Lead architecture discussions, sprint planning, OKR sessions, and roadmap development to align team goals with business objectives.
• Conduct regular 1:1s with engineers and leaders, mentoring them in both technical and leadership capacities.
• Hands-on work (~30% of time): build dashboards, review code, fix bugs, implement system alerts, debug customer issues, and contribute to internal/external documentation.

Key Achievements:

• System Scalability: Solved numerous scalability issues, increasing our system's capacity to handle up to 60,000 requests/second on email ingestion, enabling the processing of over 2.3 billion emails daily.
• Cost Reduction: Oversaw the migration of core microservices from Python to Go, resulting in significant cost savings and improved throughput (4800 containers per region to 300 containers per region)
• Customer Experience Improvement: Reduced time to identify root causes of customer issues by 30% through the introduction of OpenTelemetry (OTEL), metric improvements, and log enhancements.
• Evaluated emerging technologies to identify opportunities for innovation and competitive advantage in product offerings.
• Operational Transparency: Built dashboards, weekly reports, and daily Slack updates to provide visibility into system performance and engineering efforts, allowing leadership to allocate resources more effectively. Increased communication channels, introducing a new ticket flow, and built a robust FAQ doc that enabled support reps to continue to learn from Engineering.
• Team Development: Hired and onboarded engineers, leaders, and product owners across multiple teams.

Technology and Tools

• AWS, GCP, Nomad, Docker, Golang, Python, MongoDB, Cassandra, Github actions, Atlassian Suite, Prometheus, Grafana, Honeycomb.io, OpenTelemetry, ElasticSearch, Kibana, Figma, etc.

• Lead an engineering team of 29 (mix of developers & leaders) across frontend, backend, and data engineering. Common tasks include overseeing goals and project delivery, aligning with company strategy, ensuring dates are being met, and building roadmap with Product
• Delivered over $5m impact through new features in the last quarter
• Key player in shaping XANT's long-term plans and structure for the engineering department based around the goal of +25% headcount for this fiscal year
• Meet weekly with XANT's C-Suite to report on goal progression, ongoing initiatives, technology wins and problems, etc.
• Closely coordinate with XANT's head of Product and Customer Success in order to properly plan and prioritize projects
• Designed new processes and enhanced old in order to unblock and shield development teams to increase throughput, quality, and transparency
• Represent XANT's engineering organization on customer calls and initiatives
• Technology & tooling: AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, Docker, MySQL, Atlassian Suite, Prometheus, Grafana, Graylog, Splunk CloudHealth, Mixpanel, Invision

• Lead a team of 12 onsite engineers and 5 offshore engineers to deliver net new features and enhancements for XANT's core product using agile principles
• Owned and oversaw XANT's OKRs aimed to keep the technology and strategies aligned with the company's long term vision
• Kept a close relationship with direct reports and helped continue to challenge themselves to ensure career and personal growth via 1on1s
• Purchased and implemented Splunk APM Monitoring throughout the engineering organization
• Built the foundation for serving the Data Engineering's billions of data points from XANT's Data Lake up to the customers via core AI features
• Technology & tooling: AWS (ECS, RDS, EC2, etc), Azure, Docker, Golang, PHP, NodeJS, MySQL, Atlassian Suite, Prometheus, Grafana, Graylog, Splunk CloudHealth, OpenTelemetry, Mixpanel, Invision

• Managed three development teams (up to 12 direct reports) that spanned XANT's full stack of technologies including backend microservices, frontend applications, and core CRM integrations
• Key player in pushing the company into AWS with their new product we built from ground up. This involved doing AWS trainings, mentoring others, working with other leaders to decide on technologies to use, deployment patterns, monitoring solutions, etc.
• ~50% of time spent as an individual contributor building Golang microservices, implementing AWS technologies into our stack such as ElastiCache/ECS/RDS/S3.

• Instrumental in designing, and implementing InsideSales.com leading communications platform from ground up which handled up to a million phone calls a day
• Played a large role in the introduction of Domain Driven Design into tech stack. Coded all of the foundational DDD pieces that were needed for the monolithic application to consume
• Decoupled monolithic applications into smaller more manageable and reusable pieces by following the Domain Driven Design foundation
• Technology & tooling: PHP, MySQL, RabbitMQ, Graylog, Grafana

• Full-stack development which overtime resulted in delivery of over 30 feature enhancements

• Designed and implemented a reporting template process centered around Microsoft SSRS & SQL in order to streamline custom report creations. This was rolled out to all of their customers at the time.