Steve Rusev

Lead global engineering, AI, data, platform, DevOps, and cloud organizations across enterprise SaaS products, partnering with executive leadership to drive technology strategy, scalability, operational excellence, AI innovation, and business growth.
* Own technology strategy, architecture, and execution for AI-powered SaaS platforms serving enterprise clients, aligning technology investments with revenue growth, customer success, and long-term scalability.
Built and scaled a global engineering organization from 20 to 100+ employees and contractors across the US, UK, India, Eastern Europe, and Brazil while maintaining budget discipline, delivery excellence, and hiring high-performing teams.
* Designed scalable multi-agent and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) architectures, RAG systems, and AI orchestration frameworks that improved automation, decision-making, and customer outcomes.
* Led AI cost optimization initiatives through model selection, token management, caching, intelligent routing, and workload orchestration, improving performance while reducing operating costs.
* Partnered with enterprise customers and technical stakeholders to define roadmaps, manage SLAs, monitor uptime and performance metrics, and ensure successful adoption and retention.
Implemented reliability and operational excellence programs focused on uptime, incident response, deployment frequency, change failure rate, performance, and customer satisfaction.
* Led security, privacy, and compliance initiatives supporting SOC 2/TSC, ISO 27001, ISO 27701, NIST, PII protection, risk management, and enterprise governance requirements.
Directed MLOps, observability, monitoring, CI/CD automation, SRE practices, cloud cost management, and AI platform operations.
Technologies: AWS, GCP, Vertex AI, Gemini, Palantir Foundry, Databricks, LangChain, Python, PySpark, Kubernetes, Docker, Pinecone, Milvus, RAG, Agentic AI, Multi-Agent Systems, MLOps, SRE, SOC2, ISO 27001, ISO 27701, NIST, Enterprise SaaS Architecture.

Lead a high-performance team in the strategic exploration of AI and ML applications to enhance player experiences, foster engagement, and drive retention, while collaborating with the leadership team to shape the long-term technical vision.

• Designed, managed and implemented state-of-art technology stack which led to multimillion-dollar contracts
• Designed architecture strategies for large-scale system-wide application deployments.
• Mentored team, sharing skills and expertise and encouraged each member to bring forward ideas and suggestions for improvement.
• Communicated software architecture strategies to senior leadership and third-party business leaders.
• Drove strategic improvements to enhance operational and organizational efficiencies.
• Lead expansion and building of new offshore teams while maintaining high employee engagement and morale
• Fostered work culture of collaboration and inclusion to increase morale and reduce turnover.
• Innovated resource allocation, documentation, scheduling, and budgeting
• Created migration strategies to bridge development gaps between existing software architecture and future updates.
• Promoted a culture of collaboration, openness and diversity

Technologies: Scala, AI/ML, GCP, VertexAI, ElasticSearch, Redis, LangChain, PySpark, PyTorch, TensorFlow.

Lead the successful rebrand, migration, and relaunch of the Avention Sales and Marketing platform into D&B Hoovers

• Collaborated with cross-functional teams to integrate specific software features into finished products.
• Worked closely with management teams to plan, develop and execute technical strategies aligned to client's vision.
• Actively involved in system architecture and design-based practices
• Lead product to launch, continuously adjusting priorities to meet customer needs and business goal, working closely with Leadership on product strategy and roadmap refinement
• Allied with other engineering leaders to plan, manage and coordinate teams around reaching prescribed development milestones.
• Evaluated ongoing development efforts, providing feedback on potential methods of expediting completion and improving final results.
• Drove high-level strategic planning of development efforts across multiple projects to optimize resource utilization and shorten development times.

Technologies: Scala, Akka, React, TypeScript, Ember.JS, Redux, Terraform, Kubernetes, ElasticSearch, Kafka, Casandra

Managing team of software engineers responsible for the design, development, deployment, and support of multiple high transactional, high performance microservices based applications supporting millions of requests per hour and multimillion dollar revenue

• Cultivated partnerships between engineering, product and UX personnel to create holistically designed final products.
• Built the team roadmap and translating it into engineering goals for the team
• Drove high-level strategic planning of development efforts across multiple projects to optimize resource utilization and shorten development times.
• Provided regular feedback to both junior engineers and senior leadership on individual performance metrics and observations.
• Allied with other engineering leaders to plan, manage and coordinate teams around reaching prescribed development milestones.
• Fostered positive and performance-oriented environment by implementing successful reward systems.
• Trained and developed team of qualified and motivated employees and managed resources.
• Worked with the Senior Technical Staff & Architects to upgrade and redesign the system architecture
• Delivered product features for the business while measuring and aligning operational goals with those features by closely working with the PMs, QA, and Design
• Ensured high quality of team deliverables through rigorous in-development testing methods
• Planed, implemented, and released changes using zero-downtime techniques
• Documented, advocated and formalized patterns for resilience, availability, security, monitoring and alerting
• Built three-year technical roadmap in alignment with company directions and organization goals
• Facilitated architecture discussions, process improvements, planning, and other agile rituals
• Hired, mentored, motivated, and developed team members

Technologies: Scala, Akka, ScalaZ, ElasticSearch, Play, Kafka, Ember.js, D3, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Kubernetes, AWS

Leading an agile team in analyzing, designing and implementing core features of the Spredfast Social Customer Engagement SaaS platform. Responsible for all aspects of the engineering team's work on new features and technologies

• Evaluated project requirements to identify and mitigate risks.
• Addressed design challenges and evaluated alternative design models to meet project requirements.
• Cultivated partnerships between engineering, product and UX personnel to create holistically designed final products.
• Lead, mentored and motivated globally distributed team
• Drove high-level strategic planning of development efforts across multiple projects to optimize resource utilization and shorten development times.
• Allied with other engineering leaders to plan, manage and coordinate teams around reaching prescribed development milestones.
• Developed the social platform with scaling in mind to provide consistent throughput while supporting increasing user concurrency
• Led development on 3 simultaneous projects, multi-tasking across several deliverables while remaining in direct control of development paths.
• Directly interacted with high-level customers to verify satisfaction and integrate feedback on in-process development projects.

Technologies: J2EE, Spring Boot, Hibernate, Rest, Kafka, MySql, Jetty, Spark , Cassandra, Elastic Search, AWS, Liquibase

Developing, designing and implementing SaaS based web portals for external customers.

• Participated in weekly meetings with client to discuss project direction and milestone achievement.
• Designed architecture strategies for large-scale system-wide application deployments.
• Created REST Web service APIs and JMS messages for all software integration points
• Communicated software architecture strategies to senior leadership and third-party business leaders.
• Mentored team, sharing skills and expertise and encouraged each member to bring forward ideas and suggestions for improvement.
• Reviewed and recommended new application technologies to improve company efficiencies and help drive the
  business
• Played a very active role in the architecture of the business applications
• Drafted visual representations of software architecture design for presentation to stakeholders.

Technologies: Java, Spring, Hibernate, Jboss AS, JMS, MDB, EJB, REST WebServices, HTTP, Apache, JSF, JSP, DHTML, JSON, Ajax, Java Script, JQuery, JMX, Struts, JbossESB, RichFaces, XMLSpy, UML, Cassandra, Hudson/Jenkins

• Defined cloud architecture for both hybrid and non-hybrid cloud solutions.
• Provided architectural leadership and guidance to technical teams to deliver robust, highly scalable and cost-effective solutions.
• Created technical policies and best practices for Object Oriented Design and architecture
• Researched and understood emerging technologies and end-user needs.
• Monitored and tested application performance to identify potential bottlenecks, develop solutions and collaborate with developers on solution implementation.

Technologies : Java, HTTP, DHTML, JSF, iBatis, Java Script, XHTML, JSP, MySQL, JDBC, ODBS, Hibernate, JBoss, Tomcat, EJB3.0, Ant, ICEfaces, Web Services, Fusion Charts, Active Directory, AWS, Azure, IBM WebSphere Portal

Developing single multi-tenant on-demand SaaS-based platform for network and cloud performance management and

optimization.

• Prepared action plans for problematic processes and assets.
• Developed work plans for various personnel roles based on strengths and talents.
• Created technical policies and best practices for Object Oriented Design and Architecture
• Developed cost estimates and project specifications for proposals.
• Designed and implemented reusable components required for the project
• Mentored and lead junior developers through the implementation process
• Identified the integration methods and processes for collecting data from external systems

Technologies : J2SE, JBoss, EJB, ICEfaces, Ajax, JSF, XML, MySQL, IBM Rational Software Modeler, Jasper Reports, iReport, Eclipse, Subclipse, SVN, UML, iText, JFreeChart, Facelets

• Developing plug-ins for Eclipse 3.0 for managing the processes of the SAP J2EE Engine
• Designing and developing plug-ins for deploying and debugging J2EE applications to the SAP J2EE Engine using the Test-Driven Development.

• Developing ProSyst's Remote Manager which allows the administering of multiple devices from a single management console.