About

Stephen Solka is a Senior Engineering Manager at AngelList, with over 17 years of relevant experience in the software development industry. He is a passionate software developer who turned his hobby into a career. Stephen spends much of his free time outside of work reading books on the latest trends in the industry, software development lifecycle, development paradigms, design patterns, and technologies. Stephen has worked with several renowned companies in the past, including Alloy and Upside Travel. While working as a Staff Software Engineer at Alloy, Stephen established two teams, introduced ticket management and agile processes, and established working agreements with engineers and product. He was the lead engineer for Alloy's voter registration platform, Verify, which was a system comprised of Golang based API, Postgres, and Athena for data needs, and AWS Terraform for infrastructure. Stephen also expanded the registered voter data ingestion pipeline to cover more states, which was a combination of Golang based ECS tasks and AWS EMR (Hadoop, Pyspark). At Upside Travel, Stephen worked as a Senior Engineering Manager in the travel ecommerce group, where he had three engineering managers as direct reports and 15 second-level engineer reports. He performed technical interviews of 83 engineers, onboarded 26 across five teams, and optimized their recruiting, interview, and technical screening process to rapidly scale the teams. Stephen mentored direct reports and took ownership of their performance, engagement, and career development. He facilitated the implementation of the SWOT process to build 90 goals for growth. Stephen collaborated closely with the executive, design, and product teams to develop a software roadmap for future features and improvements. He architected and built the foundational services used to shop and sell travel inventory using Node.js, Typescript, and Golang microservices running on Kubernetes in Amazon Web Services (AWS). Stephen holds a degree from Germanna Community College and is proficient in several technologies, including AWS, Golang, ECS, Terraform, Amazon Athena, Hadoop, Postgres, infra, Kubernetes, Javascript, Typescript, Microservices, and Web.