Teodor Zhechev
Engineering Manager | Engineering Leader
Bulgaria
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A fully remote generalist-turned-manager with 18 years across desktop, web, 3D, cloud, and ops development and 8+ years in engineering leadership. My strength lies in people management — hiring for and shaping high-performing distributed teams — and driving engineering excellence through modern practices including LLM-assisted coding, CI/CD, and security & compliance programs.
Experience Timeline
SPREAD GmbH
Engineering Manager
November 2022 - February 2026 (3 years 3 months) | Bulgaria, Sofia (Remote)
Largely set in course the modern software development transformation of the company.
- Led the reconstruction of software development practices in the company by planning out and managing the implementation of cutting edge CI/CD, feature flagging, automating testing principles and others.
- Was at one point running a team of 12 people to kickstart the 'platform' sub-organization in transitioning the product to cloud/k8s.
- Took a strong role in defining profiles and hiring the future team-leads for each platform domain as the super-team was broken up, shaping team culture and technical direction from the ground up.
- Owned org-wide cross-cutting concerns: 3rd-party license scanning and reporting, CVE management, and code health reporting; contributed to ISO 27001, TISAX and SOC 2 certification efforts.
- Worked on a requirements manager type product, generating embeddings for quick similarity lookup, parsing of unstructured documents with AI and expert summaries.
- Managed the metrics dashboards (Grafana + DevLake) to keep track of SDLC health.
- Designed and worked on the IAM stack, using ory/kratos + a custom service to establish a generalisable access model and user provisioning (SSO mostly).
- Instigated and worked on load testing and optimisation of the IAM services.
SPREAD GmbH
Senior Full Stack Engineer
August 2022 - November 2022 (3 months) | Bulgaria, Sofia (Remote)
Joined as IC after receiving an excellent offer. Worked on 'Spare Parts Assist' — a digital parts shop product — doing React and Golang development before being promoted to management.
- Did a bit of optimisation for the usage of the 3D renderer that was used to visualize CAD data.
- Fixed some broken build automation pipelines.
- Worked on features for authoring the spare parts that would be available in the shop out of the full CAD bundle.
Quantive (formerly Gtmhub)
Software Engineering Lead
April 2021 - August 2022 (1 year 4 months) | Bulgaria, Sofia (Remote)
Leading a team of developers working on the company's main product.
- Took over as manager for a fresh team of 6 people, some remote from Prime, others in-country.
- Led the implementation of Workday user provisioning for the application based off of a SOAP API and our datalake. This was not fun.
- Did a lot of fixing and maintaining of the CI test suite.
- Learned a lot about cutting edge CI/CD, troubleshooting on a living, enterprise cloud system and did a bit of on-call duty.
- First time doing Golang professionally - worked on reviewing, designing and refactoring backend features.
- Started engaging with security and compliance: filling out customer security assessment questionnaires and contributing to early certification efforts.
Maplesoft
Engineering Manager
April 2017 - April 2021 (4 years) | Bulgaria, Sofia (Remote)
- Officially was first promoted to my first manager role as Team Lead.
- Was granted the Tech Lead role on a new product - electron based, dual distributable web + desktop math whiteboarding app.
- Designed and set up code quality rules and application setup. Experimented with a more functional programming typescript setup, which I thought had some promise.
- Eventually killed my own project after getting only requests for deep desktop integration with Maple - the stack made no sense, so I forced a requirement review and advised just extending the existing, fully featured codebase.
- Worked on a Flutter version of this that became Maple Learn - https://learn.maplesoft.com/
Maplesoft
Developer
July 2014 - April 2017 (2 years 9 months) | Bulgaria, Sofia (Remote)
Developing WebGL goodies.
- Worked on translating the fully featured 3D charts of Maple into a web based context via WebGL.
- Implemented a lot of things from scratch - 'ball surface' rotation of the charts, manual plane culling (because ES 2.0 doesn't support it out of the box), isosurfaces etc.
- Spent a lot of time fixing the responsivity of the document renderer by chunking execution. JS really doesn't like it when you do too much at once.
- Became person-to-ask in the newly formed team of 5 people.
Laboratory of Mathematical Chemistry OASIS
Programmer
June 2008 - July 2014 (6 years 2 months) | Bulgaria, Burgas
I worked as a generalist on whatever needed doing - that ended up including OpenGL, Java3D, Apache Tomcat, Delphi and others.
- Developed a Java-based/Tomcat web server SaaS application for generating MSDS documents. This included a bit of a bodged together word docx export, JNI with delphi native code, a very long 'wizard' like multistep evaluation, session serialization and storage, online payment and many others.
- Worked on 'Profiler' - a flow based metabolism + adverse reaction/outcomes scanning Delphi desktop application. As a result I'm tangentially a co-author of two Toxicology papers: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259722988_A_Mechanistic_Approach_to_Modeling_Respiratory_Sensitization and https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263098550_Towards_AOP_application_-_Implementation_of_an_integrated_approach_to_testing_and_assessment_IATA_into_a_pipeline_tool_for_skin_sensitization
- Created a delphi scene graph renderer for OpenGL, because up until that point we had been pretty much just using it raw.
- Created molecule conformer visualization in 3D, so users could see how the molecules were folded.
- Championed good practices, such as eliminating import loops in the codebase, because it had become impossible to use any part of it without pulling in everything. What should have been just running functions on input ended up instantiating db connections.
- Introduced proper code versioning to the team via Mercurial.
Laboratory of Mathematical Chemistry OASIS
Programmer
June 2005 - December 2006 (1 year 7 months) | Bulgaria, Burgas
Worked on a 2D molecule editor applet, then other assorted Java projects.
- Developed a Java applet, canvas-based 2D editor for converting manually drawn molecules/fragments to SMILES.
- Did some basic Java 3D chart visualiations in applets, with filtering, markers and combined data inputs.
Contact
- Email: hireme@zhechev.com
- LinkedIn: teodor-zhechev-89817146
Languages
- Bulgarian
- English
Education
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science