Engineering teams that build useful platforms

I’m Alex, an Engineering Manager based in Dublin. I help engineers grow and turn ambiguous platform problems into clear roadmaps, reliable software, and useful products.

My experience spans AI platforms at Workday, developer experience at Microsoft, security and search at Rapid7, and developer APIs at Samsung. I bring more than 20 years in software, a PhD in Computer Science, and a practical approach to leading people and technology.

Connect on LinkedIn · Email me

What I bring

• People leadership: hiring, coaching, career development, performance management, and building shared ownership.
• Platform delivery: technical strategy, roadmaps, cross-team alignment, and responsibility from architecture through production support.
• AI and developer experience: LLM applications, agentic workflows, retrieval-augmented generation, and tools that make engineers more effective.
• Engineering depth: distributed systems, multi-tenant APIs, cloud infrastructure, log search, reliability, and performance.

Experience

Workday

Manager, Software Development Engineering — Globalization / Customer Agentic Solutions
Dublin, Ireland · August 2025–present

I lead a team building reusable localization capabilities for Workday’s agentic and generative AI platforms, helping AI applications serve customers across languages.

• Established the team’s mission, roadmap, code ownership, and collaboration with platform partners.
• Guide delivery across the software development lifecycle, from early architecture and implementation to rollout and on-call support.
• Hire and coach engineers, develop their AI and platform expertise, and support career progression.
• Use candid task-level feedback and blameless reviews to improve design clarity, ownership, and collaboration across teams.

Microsoft

Senior Software Engineering Manager — 1ES Developer Experience
Dublin, Ireland · June 2022–August 2025

Led a team of 6–8 engineers building developer platforms and automation within Microsoft’s One Engineering System.

• Delivered Azure provisioning automation for Microsoft Dev Box, covering infrastructure and customized images, with cloud development environments rolled out to approximately 17,000 engineers.
• Led an AI developer assistant using retrieval-augmented generation to help engineers find knowledge and resolve support needs.
• Owned security lifecycle automation for engineering resources and coordinated migrations away from outdated pipelines.
• Hired engineers and supported six promotions through coaching and career development.

Rapid7

Senior Software Engineer → Lead Engineer and People Manager — Search / InsightIDR
Dublin, Ireland · August 2018–June 2022

• Led engineers delivering log-search APIs and the LeQL query language for security and log-management products.
• Designed and operated multi-tenant Java/AWS search services, balancing performance, reliability, and cost.
• Secured alignment across product teams for shared query infrastructure and incident-detection capabilities.
• Redesigned parsing and backend infrastructure, while helping engineers develop the expertise to extend the language more efficiently.

Samsung Electronics

Senior Software Engineer and Researcher — Tizen Developer Experience
South Korea · November 2010–April 2018

• Coordinated platform R&D across international teams of researchers and engineers.
• Developed and maintained the open-source Tizen Location C API, with HERE solutions as a core mapping provider.
• Worked on connectivity, context-awareness, and IoT APIs and services for platform and application developers.
• Collaborated with Microsoft on Tizen developer tooling and Xamarin integration.

Medicom MTD

Junior → Lead Software Engineer
Russia · August 2002–November 2010

Developed software for EEG and ECG diagnostic equipment, including application-to-device protocols and real-time biomedical signal compression across device processors and Windows applications.

How I lead

I aim to give engineers a clear purpose, enough context to make decisions, and ownership of the outcome. I combine coaching with technical engagement: asking useful questions, making trade-offs explicit, and helping teams move through uncertainty.

I value visible work, candid feedback, and small improvements that carry into the next delivery cycle. My current learning focus is how to lead teams using AI effectively across the software development lifecycle.

Technical background

AI: RAG, LLM applications, agentic workflows, AI-assisted engineering; team experience with LangGraph, LangChain, and LangSmith.
Platforms: AWS, Azure, distributed systems, multi-tenant APIs, developer platforms, CI/CD, and production operations.
Engineering: Java/JVM, C#/.NET, Python, C/C++, Kafka, Terraform/Atlantis, and Ansible.

Education and continued learning

• PhD in Computer Science, Southern Federal University, 2009 — adaptive algorithms for biomedical signal compression.
• MSc in Computer Science, Taganrog State University of Radio Engineering.
• Harvard Business School Online — Management Essentials, completed May 2026.
• Harvard Business School Online — Executing Strategy, capstone submitted; result and certificate pending.
• MIT Sloan — Implementing Agentic AI: Building Your Organizational Playbook, in progress since October 2026.

Outside work

Bonsai, ukulele, and the gym. I also enjoy books that challenge how we think about decisions, behaviour, and uncertainty.

Let’s connect

For engineering leadership and platform conversations, reach me on LinkedIn or at shulgaalexey@gmail.com.

Dublin, Ireland · Irish citizen · Updated 5 November 2026