Máté Marjai

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Engineering leader with 13+ years building and scaling technology teams across fintech, payments, and SaaS. Proven track record leading cross-functional teams of 10-30+ engineers through organizational transformations, from B2C to B2B pivots, and rapid international expansion (6 countries in 3 months at SumUp). Expertise in payment infrastructure architecture, mobile/web SDK development, and building high-performance engineering cultures. Active international speaker and community builder.

Engineering Manager at Primer

Feb 2024 -

Key Achievements

Leading the Acceptence Experience Team (9 direct reports), responsible for Mobile and Web guilds and SDKs.

  • Active part in the reorganisation to cross-functional teams
  • Fostered AI initiatives within the team as well as org-wide
  • Spearhead engineering wide initiatives like incident fire drills, mentorship programme, engineering blog and team-wide demos
  • Checkout SDK rearchitecture across the board (iOS, Android and Web) with a component based approach
  • Driving IC Growth plans and mentoring Senior and Staff engineers

Engineering Manager at Phorest

Nov 2021 - Feb 2024

Key Achievements

Leading the Ecommerce Team (8 direct reports), responsible for client facing Online Booking, Retail, Voucher services and Branded Apps in Phorest Salon Software - a major Beauty industry SAAS product

  • Personal and team career goalsetting and mentoring
  • Introduced KanBan methodology reducing cycle time by 40% and improving delivery predictability from 60% to 85%
  • Working with Senior Leadership and Product teams on technical and product roadmaps around Online Booking rearchitecture from multiple repos to React monorepo
  • Co-Founding grassroots org-wide initiatives, like the Quarterly Shoutout.

CTO at BonsaiX

July 2020 - Feb 2023

Key Achievements

Development, Operations and Architecture for BonsaiX Knowledge management services

  • Recruited and led engineering team of 5 from 0, establishing engineering culture and technical standards
  • Partnered with co-founders on product strategy and go-to-market planning
  • Architected cloud infrastructure achieving 99.9% uptime with zero-touch deployments
  • Designed analytics infrastructure providing real-time insights to sales and customer success teams
  • Managed technical budget including cloud infrastructure, tools, and vendors

Senior DevOps Specialist at CleverCards - contract

May 2019 - Oct 2021

Key Achievements

Operations and Architecture for CleverGift platform

  • Rehaul the full architecture of CleverGift in AWS, with +50% saving in the monthly bills in the process.
  • Reporting infrastructure: Architect a cloud-based, serverless solution to manage data flow between main Databases and a central reporting Database
  • E-Gift Cards: Whitelabel solution for partners of CleverGift. Design and lead the mobile and external API to be used by partners.
  • Corporate ordering: Portal Architecture & 3rd party integrations
  • MasterCard MPTS service integration for virtual card issuing

Engineering Director at ThePayment.Works

June 2016 - June 2020

Key Achievements

Technical leader for payments software toolkits serving financial institutions and payment processors globally. Responsible for system architecture, high-availability design, and whitelabel product strategy.

Engineering Director at TheProduct.Works

August 2014 - June 2020

Key Achievements

Founded and led software technology consultancy providing senior engineering leadership to fintech, healthtech, and financial services clients. Managed end-to-end client relationships from discovery through delivery.

  • Create and operate SMART App - community midwife planner
  • Grammofy - Classical music streaming.
  • EuroSEPA - Online invoice exchange and electronic payments for business.
  • Linked Finance - Peer-to-peer lending.
  • SAM Booking - language school booking engine between agents and schools.

CTO at Popdeem

August 2014 - October 2015

Key Achievements

Interim Chief Technology Officer leading technical transformation from B2C prototype to B2B platform. Reported directly to CEO, partnered with Sales and Product leadership on technical strategy.

Lead Software Engineer, Acceptance and Payments team at SumUp

January 2014 - June 2014

Key Achievements

Leading the project to deliver Pin+ - state of the art Chip and PIN solution for SMBs. Working with hardware engineering closely in the integration phase of Pin+ to bring it into production. Turning the product from early prototype phase into production ready state. Creating a delivery focused culture and advocate continuous delivery. Support the device and system certification process: GICC - EMV payments, MTIP - MasterCard, ADTV - Visa, Visa Live tests.

Senior Software Engineer, Experience and Payments team at SumUp

January 2012 - January 2014

Key Achievements

Built up the Dublin Software Team from the inception of SumUp. Working closely with SumUp's founders from the get-go. Design and create the core API and all the pieces around it with the team in Dublin. Working closely with SysOps on bootstrapping deployment processes. Lead the team to roll out 6 additional countries on top the initial 4 within 3 months after launch. Deliver and maintaining internal admin interface for Customer Service, Payment Operations, AML.

Created DSL to describe onboarding flows that can be controlled from the backend on all signup channels (web, iOS, Android). Creating early prototypes for our award winning 'customer app' proof of concept. Creating the SumUp app-switch API. Receipt delivery and printing R&D.

Software Developer, Web and Mobile team at Hostelworld

January 2011 - January 2012

Key Achievements

Creating critical features for the business working on Hostelworld's flagship site and internal admin. Conduct the migration from Bugzilla to Jira. Exploring and advocating new ways of enhancing the delivery tools used. Piloting agile workflows with key members of the organisation.

Enhancing our mobile presense on dedicated site and mobile app. Conduct code migration from JS to CoffeeScript. Delivering v1.0 of our cross platform mobile app on iOS and Android using the mobile site as a base. Reorganise the backend APIs used for mobile and external services for payments, bookings and account details.

Web Developer, Cashier team, Payments at Full Tilt Poker

November 2008 – January 2011

Key Achievements

Delivered and supported over 50 projects of various complexity, all of which were mission critical for the business. Most notable ones include: Single click deposit, Cancel withrawal, Targeted marketing messages, Flexible player limits. Designed and delivered analytics and monitoring tools for our production systems. Slimmed down our deployment process from a 25-step list into a single click solution.

Web Developer/Co-Owner - Szoftver Szerviz Iroda

February 2006 – April 2008

Helping small businesses with invoicing and accounting solutions. Web solutions consulting for small businesses (HTML, PHP, Javascript, web hosting)


Community

Erlang & Elixir meetup

Organiser 2015 - 2018

Functional Kubs

Co-Organiser 2017 - 2018

Rails Girls

Coach 2015 Galway

Coach 2017 Dublin

Progmasters

Graduate coach 2018 Budapest


Talks & workshops

Don't let it crash! - Erlang OTP workshop

CodeMesh - 2016

Kats Conf 2 - 2017

Building the largest payment sandbox on a tiny machine

CUFP - 2017

Building resilient systems for high traffic - Erlang OTP workshop

Big Data Conference Vilnius - 2017

Elixir on its best behaviour - workshop

ElixirConf EU - 2018

Elixir Katas workshop & "Managing High Load on Low Budget" presentation

Big Data Moscow - 2018

Elixir Katas workshop

CodeMesh - 2018


Studies and qualifications

Eötvös Loránd University, Faculty of Informatics, Budapest

2003 - 2008

BSc in Computer Science

Key Strength

Ruby, Erlang, Elixir, Bash/Shell, CSS, Python, PHP, PostgreSQL, MySQL, RIAK, Redis, Java, JavaScript, React, React Native

Git, CI/CD, TDD

Multi-site, team-lead, fintech, mentoring, high-availability, scalability, deployments, mobile applications, payments, workshops

kan-ban, scrum, agile, story points, user stories