Mikko Kiesilä

About Mikko Kiesilä

Engineering Leader and Systems Architect with over 15 years of experience designing and managing scalable, distributed microservices architectures on AWS and GCP. I have a proven track record of technical management for data-intensive ad-tech and media platforms processing terabytes of data.My leadership focus is on driving operational excellence and fostering high-performing engineering cultures. I specialize in optimizing delivery velocity and reliability by implementing Flow-based methodologies, Kanban, and Monte Carlo forecasting within large cross-functional organizations.I remain a hands-on builder at heart, applying my core software engineering background to architect and code complex solutions. Experience in developing Agentic Workflows using Python with OpenAI SDK, LangGraph and CrewAI, ensuring technical strategy remains grounded in practical implementation.

Experience

1. Director of Software Engineering

   Innovid

   Jun 2022 — Present · New York, NY, US

   Leading engineering organization responsible for the architecture and operations of a high-volume ad tech platform. My focus is on driving delivery velocity and engineering quality through metrics and data-driven insights, while integrating AI capabilities to deliver unified campaign management. Team Leadership: Managing engineering managers and a principal engineer; fostered a high-performance culture that resulted in internal promotions and an increase in delivery throughput. Cloud Architecture: Directed the architectural roadmap and designed new services, while optimizing the existing distributed platform on AWS (EKS, S3, OpenSearch) for performance enhancements. Operational Excellence: Transformed delivery methodologies from Scrum to Flow-based/Kanban, utilizing Monte Carlo forecasting to improve milestone accuracy and accelerating release cycles.

Education

• Helsingin yliopisto / University of Helsinki

  Master's degree, Computer Science

  1995 — 2002

Skills

• Object Oriented Design
• Open Source
• Kanban
• Maven
• Software Project Management
• Itil
• Scala
• Agile Methodologies
• Management
• Itil Process
• Leadership
• Ajax
• Project Management
• Web Services
• Mobile Applications
• Java Enterprise Edition
• Enterprise Architecture
• Soa
• Web Development
• Software Engineering
• Web Applications
• Javascript
• Uml
• Ruby
• Hibernate
• Soap
• Software Design
• Application Architecture
• Lean Software Development
• Software Development
• Certified Scrum Master Csm
• Scrum
• Xml
• Rest
• System Architecture
• Test Driven Development
• Ant
• Continuous Integration
• Agile Project Management
• Bdd