Pavel Kalandra
Prague, Czech RepublicSoftware engineer and engineering leader dedicated to building resilient systems and high-performing teams. Author of the StrongTypes NuGet package.
My Values
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Focus on your product, save on maintenance
Every system you ship is a system you keep forever. Build simple when possible, go complex when necessary. Microservices aren't a default — they're either a must-have or overkill.
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Transparency and honesty
Hard decisions need full information. What teams don't say openly, they gossip about privately.
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A Teamplayer
Show up every day with the intent to improve something — code, tests, a teammate's day. Rely on others, and be reliable for others.
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Empowered teams
Autonomous cultures where every engineer has end-to-end ownership and room to leave a mark.
Align team structure with product structure so engineers own a domain end-to-end, not just the backlog. Accountability and responsibility go hand in hand. That's empowerment.
Give the team a clear vision, budget time for bugs and escalations, and leave 10–20% unbooked so engineers can chase their own ideas. Solving problems is fun; being a coding monkey with no say isn't.
Skills
A decade of hands-on engineering across the stack, plus the leadership instincts to scale teams and systems together.
Languages & Frameworks
- C# / .NET (ASP.NET Core, EF Core, WPF)
- JavaScript / TypeScript (Vue.js / Astro)
- Go
- Python
- HTML / CSS (Tailwind, Bootstrap)
Data & Storage
- SQL (MSSQL, PostgreSQL)
- NoSQL (Azure Table Storage, Cosmos DB)
- Key-value & cache (Redis, Cloudflare KV)
- File Storage (Azure Blob, AWS S3, Supabase Storage)
- Zero-downtime schema changes during deploy
Architecture & Engineering
- System Architecture
- Microservices & distributed systems
- Modular monolith decomposition
- Messaging & workflows (Azure Service Bus, RabbitMQ, Kafka, Temporal)
- Performance optimization
- REST / GraphQL / gRPC
Cloud & Infrastructure
Comfortable owning the full production stack — from registering a domain to live dashboards.
- Cloud platforms (Microsoft Azure, AWS, Cloudflare, Supabase)
- Serverless (Azure Functions, Cloudflare Workers)
- Containers & orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
- DNS, CDN & email (Cloudflare, Brevo, SendGrid)
DevOps & Quality
- CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps Pipelines)
- E2E testing (Playwright)
- Observability, OTEL & incident management (Sentry, BetterStack, Datadog, New Relic, PagerDuty)
- Zero-downtime deploys
Product Mindset
- Continuous discovery
Analytics, support tickets, dogfooding and regular contact with users.
- The "why" behind the "what"
Interrogating feature requests for the underlying job-to-be-done.
- User disengagement
The best UX is the one the user never has to open. Surface anomalies, free the human.
About me
A few things I get up to when I'm away from the keyboard.
I sing
Karaoke? I'm in!
Games of every kind
Board games, video games, sport — if it's a game, I want in.
Former footballer
I used to spend a lot of time doing sports. Now I need to pace myself due to ankle injuries.
Esports past
Competed at a high level in League of Legends and Rocket League.
Two wheels
I spent some time in motorcycle amateur races. (190cc)
Father of two
Most of my non-work time goes here.
Career Journey
Lead Engineer (CTO)
tickadoo
A hands-on role leading a single-pizza team building an app for selling tickets from third-party providers. Owning the overall system architecture, feature design, backlog prioritization and engineering ways of working — while still shipping production code every day.
Staff Software Engineer
Outreach
Didn't stay long, left for a great opportunity as Lead Engineer at tickadoo.
Tribe Lead
Rossum
My only hands-off role — middle management. Led roughly one third of engineering — a team of 15. I ran an initiative to align team structure with product structure so engineers could have end-to-end ownership of their domain. I put principles and processes in place that kept technical quality from being sacrificed under tight deadlines. I built a transparent roadmap to manage stakeholder delivery expectations and discuss staffing requirements. I hired and coached new leaders.
Mews
6 years across 3 roles
Apr 2023 — Mar 2024
Staff Engineer
Single-handedly drove a DX initiative that cut local startup time by 61%, saved 137 GB of database bloat, and overhauled the FuncSharp library — improving hot-path performance and adding stronger type-safety to prevent entire categories of bugs at compile time. Championed culture changes across backend engineering.
Jan 2019 — Apr 2023
Engineering Manager, Finance
Led cross-functional team overseeing billing, reporting, and fiscal compliance. Transitioned to multi-tax systems for global expansion.
Mar 2018 — Dec 2018
Back End Developer
Software Developer
ZENTITY a.s.
Owned an ASP.NET web application end-to-end, including the Azure infrastructure it ran on — Azure SQL, Azure Table Storage, and Azure Active Directory. Replaced the legacy SSRS reports with an interactive Vue.js frontend that pulled data from a dedicated API and rendered responsive d3.js charts, complete with a sidebar filter so users could slice the data themselves.
Early Career
CN Group CZ · Lynax
Started as a C# intern during university, progressing through WPF development and CodedUI testing. Built desktop applications and tablet interfaces.