Hi, I'm Valentinos.

About Me

My name is Valentinos Papasavvas. I am sociable, energetic and friendly person. My interpersonal skills make me a good communicator, able to work well with others. I motivate and encourage people around me. I am self-aware and always seek to learn and grow. I am not scared of undertaking new responsibilities no matter the degree of difficulty. I am a critical thinker and a good researcher.

Currently, my main focus is on coaching teams and transforming startups to reach the next level. Day to day operations are:

• Allocate resources, manage expectations and performance, and drive team efficiencies
• Manage the use of technology stacks and ensures that team members grow their knowledge base, by utilizing Online courses and additional professional development
• Participate in the hiring and onboarding process
• Work with other business units to analyze trends and product needs for continues product improvement
• Enhance engineering efficiency by closely observing the team and identify opportunities
• Provide mentorship and technical guidance to teammates
• Own development projects from conception through build, testing, implementation and support ensuring they meet business needs.
• Manage QA resources to ensure through testing of all code before release. Utilising automated testing where possible.

We give emphasis on delivering a feature or a final product on time along with quality code. Each person evaluates and reviews code of others to guarantee the best result.

In my free time, I am an active and athletic person seeking for action and adventure all the time. I always look for new technologies and like to play and develop my own projects, in order to expand my knowledge and keep up to date with the latest technologies. I tend to play with latest technologies and programming languages, which some of them can be found in my Github page.

This resume was build by a module I wrote called Drupal Resume.

Experiences

• Head of Engineering

  Intergo Telecom Ltd

  09/2021 - Current

  THE ROLE:

  Leading and growing a diverse team of 20 professionals across Engineering, QA, Technical Support, IT and Infrastructure driving the design, implementation, and optimization of these innovative solutions. By empowering our teams with the resources, support, and autonomy they need, we've cultivated an environment where creativity flourishes, and groundbreaking ideas come to life. I've had the privilege of spearheading our company's remarkable growth journey since 2021, with a strong emphasis on empowering teams to drive technological innovation along with unlocking core features of our products. Managed to shape the company from a small startup to be today’s FT-1000 Europe’s fastert-growing company (one of the 2 in Cyprus ) and be part of Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50 award.

  Company had 5x employee growth from 2021 until 2024 and 70-80% YOY revenue.

  Current stack used (hands-on experience) is PHP OO based in Laravel, Lumen, using GO for microservices and leveraging MariaDB, Elasticsearch, Redis, ELK, APM (AppOptics and OpenTelemetry),RabbitMQ, Harbor  for private docker registry, Github Actions with Jenkins for CI/CD all dockerized etc in an optimized way to scale and be resilient. Use of Attlasian package (Jira, Confluence) for documentation and following a 2 week Sprint through Jira in an Agile environment along with documentating test cases in Testrail.

  RESPONSIBILITIES:

  • Manage and lead day to day operations, collaborating with the team leads, including scoping projects, resource management, assigning workload, training and development.
  • Participate daily on potential and existing customer meetings discussing with their Engineering Team how our Products can be integrated and identify needs that we can implement to help more businesses
  • Allocate resources, manage expectations and performance, and drive team efficiencies
  • Manage the use of technology stacks and ensures that team members grow their knowledge base, by utilizing Online courses and additional professional development
  • Successfully implemented ISO-27001, ensuring the highest standards of security, compliance, and risk management across the organization.
  • Participate in the hiring and onboarding process
  • Work with other business units to analyze trends and product needs for continues product improvement
  • Enhance engineering efficiency by closely observing the team and identify opportunities
  • Provide mentorship and technical guidance to teammates
  • Identifying bottlenecks on the systems and try and find the cause through various APM tools
  • Own development projects from conception through build, testing, implementation and support ensuring they meet business needs.
  • Manage QA resources to ensure through testing of all code before release. Utilising automated testing where possible.

• Software Development Manager

  Mindgeek

  08/2019 - 09/2021

  THE ROLE:

  Leading and coaching a team of nearly 30 professionals across engineering and QA,spearheading one of the company's largest in-house services along with other critical internal products, ensuring the delivery of high-quality, robust software solutions within defined timelines and budgets.

  Current stack used (hands-on experience) is PHP OO based in Laravel, Lumen leveraging MySQL, Elasticsearch, Redis, ELK, APM (AppOptics), RabbitMQ, Harbor  for private docker registry, Gitlab CI for CI/CD. Use of Attlasian package (Jira, Confluence) for documentation and following a 2 week Sprint through Jira in an Agile environment along with documentating test cases in Testrail.

  RESPONSIBILITIES:

  • Manage and lead day to day operations, collaborating with the team leads, including scoping projects, resource management, assigning workload, training and development.
  • Allocate resources, manage expectations and performance, and drive team efficiencies
  • Manage the use of technology stacks and ensures that team members grow their knowledge base, by utilizing Online courses and additional professional development
  • Participate in the hiring and onboarding process
  • Work with other business units to analyze trends and product needs for continues product improvement
  • Enhance engineering efficiency by closely observing the team and identify opportunities
  • Provide mentorship and technical guidance to teammates
  • Own development projects from conception through build, testing, implementation and support ensuring they meet business needs.
  • Manage QA resources to ensure through testing of all code before release. Utilising automated testing where possible.

• Lead Software Developer

  Mindgeek

  09/2017 - 08/2019

  THE ROLE:

  Responsible for coaching a team that deals with one of the biggest products of the company along with other internal products the company has, providing continuous feedback, suggesting potential improvements, working closing with the product department.

  RESPONSIBILITIES:

  • Setting a sustainable pace to deliver the completed, tested, integrated, production ready software
  • Analyse processes in order to provide solutions
  • Providing continues feedback to the team
  • Making regular meetings with Seniors to improve the process of the team
  • Making bi-weekly meetings with the team to discuss the Sprint process and what we can do better
  • Dealing with issues that block the Sprint process
  • Suggesting new technologies to improve and optimize the services a product uses
  • Split the deliverable into stages and make small releases.
  • Perform code review and detrermine recommendations for adaptation
  • Pair programming to approach a problem with different opinions

• Senior PHP Developer

  MindGeek

  01/2017 - 09/2017

  THE ROLE:

  Responsible for maintaining the products the company has, collaborate with the team for potential improvements, involve in project management.

  RESPONSIBILITIES:

  • Setting a sustainable pace to deliver the completed, tested, integrated, production ready software
  • Analyse processes in order to provide solutions
  • Team collaboration in Cyprus and Germany
  • Split the deliverable into stages and make small releases.
  • Perform code verification and detrermine recommendations for adaptation
  • Pair programming to approach a problem with different opinions

• Senior PHP Programmer

  Approved Food

  08/2016 - 11/2016

  THE ROLE:

  Responsible for the internal picking system, collaborate with the team for potential improvements, involve in project management.

  RESPONSIBILITIES:

  • Setting a sustainable pace to deliver the completed, tested, integrated, production ready software
  • Split the current system into Microservices written in Laravel Framework that will consume an API,written in Lumen Framework
  • Reviewing new technologies and making suggestions for possible improvements in the system
  • Collaborate with the people in the warehouse to understand the needs of the system
  • Split the deliverable into stages and make small releases.
  • Undertake merge requests for code improvement
  • Implement unit and integration tests
  • Pair programming to approach a problem with different opinions

• Senior Web Developer - iOS Developer

  Llama Digital

  02/2014 - 08/2016

  THE ROLE:
  
  Collaborate with others to deliver quality code, involve in project management, provide guidance and imporevements in the process of delivering a feature/product to a client.
  
  RESPONSIBILITIES:

  • Setting a sustainable pace to deliver the most completed, tested, integrated, production ready software
  • Stand up meetings to keep up to date with the process of each person in the team
  • Suggest solutions to the team and get different opinions of how to achieve the best result
  • Communicate with the clients and understand their requirements
  • Split the deliverable into stages and show each stage to the client to see the progress and to get feedback.
  • Use of Rubber Duck Debugging method
  • Meet the deadlines inside the team by dividing and analysing each point of a project/feature
  • Refactor whenever is needed to keep the project quality and security up to date
  • Implement unit testing - TDD for the developers to be aware if they accidentally break a feature and BDD for the clients to understand what we tested for the deliverable based on the User Stories
  • Pair programming to approach a problem with different opinions
  • Develop and maintain the company's main mobile Application called Situate on iOS
  • Work on various type of big projects of the company based on PHP MVC Framework
  • Use merge requests for code review
  • Suggest new technologies to be used based on client requirements

• Web Developer

  Llama Digital

  01/2012 - 02/2014

  THE ROLE:
  
  Started as Graduate Web Developer, I was involved of learning and developing in all CMS of the company. After that point, I was trained with PHP Zend Framework to collaborative with developer and project management teams to deliver quality development.
  
  RESPONSIBILITIES:

  • Pair with a team and work on big projects based on PHP Zend Framework
  • Maintain and support various CMS that the company has (Drupal 6,7, MODx Evolution/Revolution, Magento E-commerce,Wordpress) 
  • Convert legacy code into a quality structure code
  • Started using version control

Skills

Languages

Hobbies

Awards