Dan Danaila

About Dan Danaila

I love tackling challenges. Growing up in Romania I used to spend hours solving math problems. At first, my mother, who shared my passion, accompanied me. However, as those became more complex I had to continue by myself. The road was filled with ups and downs. I mostly remember the ups: being in the top 3 in the Romanian Math Olympiad 5 times in a row & representing Romania successfully in international contests.In college I decided to follow an older passion that excited me as a child, computer science. At Imperial College London I met brilliant people that became my friends. At first I felt the knowledge gap was insurmountable, given that for most of them CS was their passion.I got a glimpse in the finance industry at Morgan Stanley in a spring week. Then I had my first job experience when I interned at Bloomberg. Later on I interned at Facebook where I had a blast. Looking back, I realize that the culture & people were what made me eagerly go back to FB in 2017 when I joined the Everstore team. The complex eco-system that enabled people to share media intrigued me. I looked up to the people who designed & built those and wished that some day I could be half as good as them.One of the things that I enjoyed about Facebook was the dreaded review cycle. At first it scared me, but then I looked at it as a way to keep my growth in check. As it was not purely focused on impact, it encouraged me to develop other skills. Over the years FB provided me with many mentoring opportunities: onboarding >20 new hires, successfully managing 2 interns, ramping up new team mates & mentoring other TLs.One interesting concept that at first scared me, but ended up enjoying was oncall. This meant being responsible for all the services in the team 24/7. This involved me in many incidents that required hard investigations. Those exposed me to systems inside & outside of my team, which was AN AMAZING learning opportunity. At times it was stressful, as you’re against the clock to ensure people using FB/IG/WA don’t get to experience the outage.Another notable memory was being called TL for the first time: I was assigned to ramp up a person 2 levels above me, who became my friend & mentor. Becoming a Tech Lead was a bumpy road filled with many lessons. I am grateful to the managers & senior staff in the Storage Org & engineers that have continuously challenged me, but also supported me through the tougher times.Success of a Tech Lead can be summarized to: technical skills x communication skills x people you support.This journey is 1% finished.

Experience

1. Staff Software Engineer

   The Trade Desk

   Mar 2025 — Present · Seattle, WA, US

   Infrastructure team - Ventura TV OS

Education

• Imperial College London

  MEng, Joint degree Mathematics and Computer

  2012 — 2016

Skills

• Haskell
• C++
• Oop
• Python
• Latex
• Git
• Mercurial
• Java
• Mathematics
• Html
• Eclipse
• X86 Assembly
• Prolog
• C
• Programming
• Microsoft Office
• Sql
• Linux
• Vim
• Mongodb