Michael Bolotski

About Michael Bolotski

I have a 25-year track record of personal technical innovation, team leadership, and project management, all in startups. I have grown teams from 0 to 70 engineers, and have also inherited existing engineering organizations. I have delivered into production a broad variety of technical products, from miniature displays to projection televisions to mobile apps to consumer internet applications to autonomous drone delivery systems. I have led highly effective cross-disciplinary teams of software and hardware engineers, research scientists, QA, and operations staff. My main approach to scaling and improving technical teams is to continually analyze and eliminate friction and bottlenecks:* Standardized, low-friction development processes make for happier, more effective engineers, and reduce new hire ramp time.* Decentralized decision making by team leads (and their teams) reduces communication overhead and improves the sense of ownership. To make effective decisions, teams need to understand the business rationale behind product features.* Aligned technical and organizational structure speeds development by avoiding the delays when a single feature spans multiple teams, each with their own development priorities.* Meaningful, visible metrics, whether feature delivery rates, server response times, or deployment cycle times, focus the team on a common objective and the philosophy of continuous improvement. To understand the team’s perception of the development process I always participate in hands-on development, ideally working on the least desirable tasks. My very broad technical background allows me the opportunity to earn the trust and respect of engineers, and help solve cross-team issues. On many occasions, I have worked side by side with with a tiger team to address the company’s most critical technical challenge.

Experience

1. Director, Research Engineering

   Meta

   Feb 2025 — Present

Education

• The University of British Columbia

  M. A. Sc, Electrical Engineering

  1988 — 1990

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), EECS

  1990 — 1996

Skills

• Mobile Applications
• Mobile Devices
• Start-Ups
• Software Design
• Agile Methodologies
• Fpga
• Cloud Computing
• Software Development
• Java
• Distributed Systems
• Software Engineering
• Mobile Technology
• Scrum
• C++
• Embedded Software
• Object Oriented Design
• Product Development
• Cad
• Asic
• Project Management
• Vlsi
• Perl
• Parallel Computing
• Image Processing
• Unix
• Algorithms
• Scalability
• Embedded Systems
• Architecture
• Firmware
• Linux
• System Architecture
• Databases
• Simulations
• Electronics
• Management