# Valerii Martseniuk **Engineering Manager** val@valmb.com | valmb.com | linkedin.com/in/valerii-martseniuk | United States --- ## Summary Engineering Manager leading two teams (10 engineers) reporting to the CTO at Newsela, an edtech platform serving millions of K-12 students and teachers. Shipping AI-powered features that reached top-tier adoption within weeks. Track record of delivering cross-org initiatives spanning 6+ teams without dedicated program management. Currently driving spec-driven development across the engineering org - an AI-native methodology compressing requirements-to-implementation, with early results showing ~50% faster ticket completion. --- ## Key Achievements - Led LLM-powered feature delivery (OpenAI, Gemini) that reached the platform's highest adoption tier within weeks of launch - zero PII sent to external models, with a novel content evaluation framework built from scratch - Consolidated ~12 microservices into a single monolith with zero production incidents; transformed a system with zero observability into a fully monitored platform (Datadog dashboards, alerts, on-call rotation) - Coordinated cross-org initiative spanning 6+ teams with no dedicated project team - secured a major district renewal (direct revenue impact) and set architecture precedent for future content types - Drove spec-driven development adoption across product and engineering, securing buy-in from senior product leadership - versioned specs as single source of truth, consumable by LLM coding agents - Developed IC into Tech Lead through epic captain model; engineer later promoted to lead another team --- ## Experience ### Newsela | 2018 - Present EdTech platform serving millions of K-12 students and teachers **Engineering Manager** | Jan 2025 - Present 2 teams (Plan & Deliver + Writing), 10 direct reports, 70-person engineering org, reporting to CTO People & Team Building: - Built culture of team-driven innovation: engineers independently replaced vendor TTS system (AWS Polly) with open-source solution (Coqui TTS), expanding language support and reducing costs - came from the team, not the roadmap - Currently managing dual EM + interim TL responsibilities during leadership transition while maintaining delivery velocity - Addressed performance gaps through structured, multi-month feedback processes with documented expectations and clear outcomes - Developed IC into interim Tech Lead through epic captain model; engineer later promoted to lead another team Product & Strategy: - Co-led product discovery at story mapping stage for every major initiative - defined success criteria and measurement plans before engineering work began - Led delivery of LLM-powered graphic organizers that became one of the platform's most-used features within weeks - zero PII exposure, novel evaluation process - Led technical planning for Generation Genius video integration (1,000+ videos) - coordinated across product, engineering, content, and the acquired company's team to ship on time for Back to School - Established experimentation culture: teams now propose segmentation strategies and run controlled rollouts to validate impact Technical Leadership: - Led consolidation of ~12 microservices into a single monolith - zero production incidents, from zero observability to comprehensive monitoring - Drove Writing platform migration using strangler pattern - maintained production stability for millions of users through Back to School launch - Resolved critical data integrity escalation, then transformed the response into lasting infrastructure: daily health instrumentation, threshold-based alerting, overhauled on-call processes - Introduced central spec repository where product commits requirements as PRs - architecture decisions and data models are versioned artifacts enabling AI-assisted implementation **Tech Lead** | Aug 2022 - Jan 2025 Learning Delivery / Plan & Deliver team - Designed content visibility system V2 architecture - replaced tens of thousands of individual content IDs per user with a handful of set slugs; described internally as "one of the biggest projects in company history" - Created phased TRD framework for Generation Genius integration (12 revisions with stakeholders); adopted org-wide as the reference model for cross-team planning - Shipped a differentiated instruction feature and content visibility V2 on the same day - both on time, zero critical bugs during 5-week experiment period with 40% of paid users - Drove domain language standardization across platform and BI teams - eliminated recurring cross-team confusion and enabled consistent analytics **Senior Software Engineer** | 2020 - Aug 2022 - Built platform API integrations (LTI, Google Classroom, Canvas, Schoology, Clever) enabling SSO and roster sync for tens of thousands of teachers - Promoted through three levels in four years (Software Engineer to Senior to Tech Lead) **Software Engineer** | 2018 - 2020 ### Immersion | 2017 | 4 months - Designed automated blue-green deployment pipeline (Terraform, Python) replacing fully manual EC2 process ### SoftServe (contractor for Amplify) | 2013 - 2016 | 3.5 years - Full-stack engineer on Amplify's education platform (Python, JavaScript, Java, MongoDB, MySQL) with CI/CD and AWS infrastructure --- ## Education - **M.S. Computer Science** - United States - **M.S. Applied Mathematics / Automation Engineering** - Ukraine ## Technical Skills - **Languages:** Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, SQL - **Frameworks:** Django, Flask, FastAPI, React, Next.js - **AI/ML:** LLM integration (OpenAI, Gemini), prompt engineering, LangFuse, evaluation frameworks - **Infrastructure:** AWS, CI/CD, Docker, Terraform, Datadog, monitoring/observability - **Data:** PostgreSQL, MongoDB, MySQL, data modeling, API design - **Process:** Spec-driven development, domain-driven design, TDD, Scrum, cross-functional coordination