Yavor Boychev

Transitioning into the role of Director of Engineering marked a pivotal phase in my leadership journey, where I took more of second-line management responsibilities and played a key role in shaping the strategic direction of our engineering initiatives.

Strategic Leadership and Second-Line Management:

• Team Leadership: Directed an organization of 45 engineers distributed across 6 scrum teams, each operating with diverse operational models across global locations.
• Managerial Oversight: I directly managed four first-line managers while providing guidance and support to an additional two first-line managers through a dotted-line management structure. This approach ensured seamless team collaboration and enhanced overall performance.
• Delivery Oversight: Led the successful delivery of critical strategic product initiatives, including the implementation of EDR Everywhere, XDR Network Traffic Analyses, and Carbon Black's PowerShell module - CarbonCLI;
• Global UI Team Leadership: Appointed as the global leader for Carbon Black's horizontal UI team, I established and operationalized a multi-geo user interface team, consisting 25 engineers across four geos - Bulgaria, US, India, Israel, guiding

Strategic Talent Management

• Spearheaded operational initiatives focusing on talent acquisition, retention, goal setting, mentorship, and talent development, ensuring a dynamic and motivated team. Achieving 90% offer acceptance during interview process, < 5% yearly voluntary attrition rate
• Strategic Goal Setting: Defined and monitored the execution of strategic goals, ensuring alignment with organizational objectives - Annual framework for setting SMART goals at both the personal and team levels, with a robust quarterly review process in place.

My tenure as Director of Engineering has been characterized by a commitment to driving operational excellence, strategic vision, and fostering a culture of innovation within the engineering organization at VMware Carbon Black.

As the inaugural manager to join the Carbon Black team in Bulgaria in 2020, I played a pivotal role in establishing and expanding the organization from ground zero to a thriving unit comprising several dozen engineers across diverse functions — including Development, Testing, UX, SRE, and Release Engineering.

Fast forward a year and a half, the Carbon Black team in Bulgaria has flourished to over 85 professionals, a testament to our collective achievements. Currently, I lead multiple development teams overseeing critical domains such as Data Processing Pipeline, Developer Relations, UI, and K8s/Container Security.

In addition to my managerial responsibilities, I spearhead an internal cross-geo knowledge-sharing initiative known as 'Traditional Tuesday Technology and Product Ramp Up.' This program facilitates the exchange of expertise among engineering teams in Israel, India, and Bulgaria, fostering a collaborative environment for knowledge dissemination in the realms of security and Carbon Black products.

It's been a rewarding journey driving both the strategic growth of the teams I manage and promoting a culture of continuous learning and collaboration across geographies.

As a key member of the core leadership team at Docker's Sofia site, I played a pivotal role in establishing the Sofia engineering site, contributing significantly to our site, business, and product goals for H2 2019 / H1 2020

• Rapid Team Growth: Orchestrated the swift growth of the Sofia team from inception to approximately 20 engineers within a remarkable three-month span, encompassing crucial roles in UX, UI, Backend, System Test, and Infrastructure engineering.
• Hiring Excellence: Crafted and executed a well-defined hiring strategy, implemented an effective interview process, fostered relationships with recruitment agencies, and established a robust candidate pipeline.
• Strategic Positioning: Positioned Sofia as a pivotal engineering site, taking a leadership role in specific areas within major Docker open source and commercial products.
• Cultural Development: Instilled a culture of collaboration, transparency, and dedication within the team, fostering an environment conducive to innovation and high performance.
• Performance Management: Established streamlined team processes for performance valuation and goal setting, ensuring alignment with organizational objectives.
• Community Engagement: Actively engaged with local Docker, Kubernetes, and Dev communities, contributing to conferences and meetups to enhance the team's visibility and network within the broader tech ecosystem.
  

Engineering Lead | "Unified Docker Identity" Project

• Strategic Leadership: Led the Authentication (AuthN) and Authorization (AuthZ) story for Docker's evolving portfolio of SaaS products, driving the project's strategic direction.
• Decision-Making Facilitation: Facilitated and led design and decision-making meetings, ensuring alignment with project goals and overall product vision
• Effective Project Management: Spearheaded project planning and execution, navigating the complexities of a critical initiative within Docker.

As a Functional Architect I've been acting as an engineer within the product management team, as a product manager within the engineering team, as a trusted partner for our field team and as a cloud automation evangelist, consultant and enabler for our customers. As part of the team delivering VMware's Cloud Automation Services, I've worked on some of the most critical and major projects and initiatives, such as: policy based provisioning service, troubleshooting and simulation , IaaS API, Cloud Automation Services' Bosh CPI, etc. I'm also proud of participating/leading two patent applications (patents received): *METHODS AND APPARATUS TO GENERATE VIRTUAL RESOURCE PROVISIONING VISUALIZATIONS and HОST COMPUTING SYSTEM DETERMINATION TO DEPLOY VIRTUAL MACHINES BASED ON DISK SPECIFICATIONS

• Drafted design objectives and system design documents.
• Developed marketing materials and presentations to cultivate new opportunities.
• Interacted with customers to provide timely and relevant status updates.
• Resolved conflicts between departments regarding system design decisions.
• Tested the functionality of applications to verify accuracy and completeness.
• Assisted in troubleshooting complex issues related to system architecture or performance.

VMware Professional Services Center of Excellence team (PSCoE) is part of the global VMware professional services organization. Team's primary focus is to build solutions that help customers to fully benefit from the capabilities of a virtual infrastructure by integrating open source and third party products and automating processes. PS CoE is staffed by a dedicated team of VMware software architects, designers, developers, testers and support staff, co-located with R&D teams to provide a high quality and responsive approach to meeting the needs of the field teams and customers world-wide.

• Managed multiple projects simultaneously while ensuring deadlines were met within resource constraints.
• Collaborated with cross-functional team to define features and build powerful and easy-to-use products and customer-facing workflow tools.
• Worked closely with product managers to define scope of projects based on business objectives.
• Assisted in recruiting efforts by interviewing candidates and making hiring recommendations.
• Provided mentorship to team members through one-on-one interactions or group training sessions.