Mikael Danielian

Leading engineering, architecture, delivery, and technology operations across multiple companies and product domains supporting high-scale, transaction-heavy digital platforms.

• Define technology strategy and translate business objectives into engineering roadmaps, quarterly and annual plans, budgets, and investment priorities.
• Partner with C-level leadership to shape company strategy, assess new initiatives, and align technology decisions with commercial goals.
• Drive AI adoption across the full software development lifecycle — requirements and ticket refinement, coding, reviews, testing, deployment, monitoring, and support.
• Own architectural direction for distributed, event-driven systems, focused on scalability, reliability, performance, security, and maintainability.
• Direct engineering, DevOps, infrastructure, and L2/L3 support functions, including operational readiness and platform reliability.
• Establish governance for architecture reviews, pull requests, releases, production readiness, incident response, and post-release monitoring.
• Design performance and scoring systems to measure delivery, quality, ownership, reliability, and continuous improvement.

Expanded into a broader engineering leadership role, overseeing multiple teams and contributing to company-wide technology and business strategy.

• Led quarterly and annual engineering planning, aligning team capacity, delivery priorities, and technical investment with company objectives.
• Managed engineering budgets, resource allocation, hiring plans, and technology-related operational costs.
• Influenced company-wide architectural decisions, platform evolution, technology standards, and long-term technical direction.
• Supported engineering managers and technical leaders with team development, delivery execution, performance management, and strategic decision-making.
• Balanced short-term business needs with scalability, reliability, technical debt reduction, and long-term platform sustainability.

Expanded from leading a single engineering team to managing multiple teams responsible for platform development and new product initiatives.

• Led multiple engineering teams, coordinating priorities, dependencies, and delivery across different products and technical domains.
• Owned development of new experimental products, taking initiatives from early validation and prototyping through production delivery.
• Defined and implemented a cross-platform engineering strategy that enabled teams to adopt new technologies and share capabilities across products.
• Established shared engineering practices covering the software development lifecycle, testing, releases, deployment, and production support.

Led an engineering team responsible for rebuilding a legacy platform and delivering a modern, scalable replacement.

• Owned the technical strategy and roadmap for platform modernization, including architecture, migration planning, and delivery priorities.
• Built and developed the engineering team through recruitment, onboarding, mentoring, performance feedback, and career development.
• Established the testing strategy, including automated testing, integration testing, release validation, and quality controls.
• Owned deployment and release processes, reducing risk during the transition from the legacy platform.

Senior engineer on the Growth team, contributing to Toptal's public website serving millions of users per month.

• Delivered customer-facing features focused on user acquisition, engagement, and conversion.
• Contributed to internal tools that improved development workflows and supported business operations.
• Owned features across the full lifecycle, from technical design and implementation to deployment, monitoring, and production support.
• Improved reliability, scalability, and performance of a high-traffic global platform.

Led the engineering team responsible for delivering multiple software products and client projects.

• Managed project delivery from business requirements and planning through development, testing, and release.
• Guided architectural decisions across e-commerce, CRM, CMS, real-time systems, and mobile application APIs.
• Worked with stakeholders to define priorities, scope, timelines, and technical expectations.
• Supported engineers through mentoring, code reviews, technical guidance, and regular feedback.

Took ownership of complex projects and guided technical implementation across multiple client solutions.

• Designed and developed scalable e-commerce, CRM, CMS, real-time, and API-based applications.
• Made technical and architectural decisions for performance, maintainability, and scalability.
• Mentored junior developers and improved engineering standards, testing, and release processes.

Developed custom web and mobile solutions for clients across different industries.

• Built e-commerce platforms, CRM systems, CMS solutions, and APIs for mobile applications.
• Translated business requirements into reliable, maintainable software features.

Developed both customer-facing and internal business systems for an e-learning platform.

• Built and maintained the public website, delivering a reliable experience for platform users.
• Developed an internal operations CRM supporting day-to-day workflows and business processes.
• Worked across the full development lifecycle, including implementation, testing, deployment, and maintenance.