Michal Šváb

Michal Šváb

Lead Engineer • Staff Engineer • Prague, Czech Republic / Remote

michal@svab.net • LinkedIn • GitHub

Profile

I am a software engineer with about 15 years of experience building and leading backend-heavy products, infrastructure, and teams. I work best in roles where hands-on delivery, technical direction, client support, and reliability are all part of the job, and I try to lead by example.

I lead Payroll Connect at Deel, taking it from first customers to 190 customers, while managing a small engineering team and staying close to architecture, security, incidents, and implementation.

Experience

Team Lead @ Deel

January 2024 - Present     Remote

  • Lead Payroll Connect within Deel's Global Payroll organisation.
  • Manage 6 engineers and QA across delivery, incidents, hiring, and technical direction.
  • Drive architecture, technical direction, and security posture across Payroll Connect.
  • Grew Payroll Connect from zero customers to 190 customers.
  • Built core enterprise payroll workflows and supported migration of acquired-company clients onto Deel.
  • Hired engineers and mentored them into senior engineers.
  • Led the team's shift to AI-assisted development, improving delivery speed and incident resolution through agent-based workflows.

CTO @ Alacrity Law

July 2018 - September 2023     Remote

  • Led engineering for a legal matter management platform that enabled clients to compare quotes from multiple law firms and improve legal matter outcomes.
  • Managed a team of 5 engineers, hiring part of the team and leading planning, 1:1s, and performance reviews.
  • Owned backend, infrastructure, security, ISO 27001 compliance, and delivery of product features.
  • Shipped core workflows for legal matter intake, law-firm quote comparison, matter tracking, and client reporting.
  • Automated AWS infrastructure with Terraform and kept infrastructure costs aligned with the company's stage through regular cost reviews.
  • Maintained strong platform reliability, with downtime typically limited to a single planned database upgrade each year.
  • Ran audits, controls, and remediation for ISO 27001.

Lead Software Engineer @ Envision

September 2016 - July 2018     Remote

  • Built an e-commerce payment platform that enabled online stores to accept customer payments more easily.
  • Took ownership of backend services after the CTO's departure, moving from senior IC into technical leadership.
  • Consolidated fragmented services and reduced cloud costs by simplifying the microservice architecture.
  • Built a payment state machine using event sourcing and CQRS patterns.
  • Created deployment automation with Docker, Ansible, Bamboo, Terraform, and Azure.

Software Engineer @ Adthena

February 2015 - March 2016     London, UK

  • Built a Google Ads analytics and competitor-intelligence platform that helped companies evaluate ROI on advertising spend and identify successful campaigns.
  • Built and operated backend services, scrapers, and data-processing pipelines.
  • Improved scraper stability and materially reduced infrastructure costs by moving .NET scrapers from Windows servers to a Linux runtime.
  • Contributed to large-scale data collection and processing systems using Apache Spark, Storm, and RabbitMQ.
  • Worked on front-end reporting and data visualisation using Backbone and ES6.

Software Engineer @ Gamesys

July 2013 - August 2014     London, UK

  • Built a Java-based CMS for serving device-appropriate image assets across digital gaming products.
  • Developed JavaScript showcase applications and worked in a TDD-focused delivery environment.

Software Engineer @ Capita Employee Benefits

April 2011 - June 2013     London, UK

  • Built a Java-based portal for managing employee benefits and pension products.
  • Rewrote a legacy messaging platform using Apache Camel and ActiveMQ to improve maintainability and integration reliability.

Software Engineer @ MoroSystems

September 2008 - February 2011     Brno, CZ

  • Built e-commerce web applications using Spring, Hibernate, and JavaScript.
  • Improved application and database performance through profiling, caching, and targeted optimisation.

Skills

  • Core strengths

    Engineering leadership, backend architecture, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure

  • Primary stack

    Node, TypeScript, Postgres, Terraform, AWS

  • Additional experience

    React, Java, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Elasticsearch, Redis

  • Infrastructure and platforms

    Docker, Azure, Kubernetes, Ansible, Lambda

  • Ways of working

    Hiring, mentoring, technical planning, incident management, cross-functional collaboration

Education

Bc. Information Technology

2006 - 2009     Brno University of Technology, CZ

BSc equivalent