SHAI YALLIN

Software Gardener

As a founding member of the Wix Engineering organization, and as the principal engineer of the Orbs Blockchain platform, I hired and led dozens of software engineers and engineering leads. I can help you with hiring, scaling your software system or your organization, create a better engineering culture, mentor your engineers in sustainable development methodologies, or get my hands dirty and help you deal with the fallout of accelerated growth.

SERVICES

What I can do for you

MENTORSHIP

Principal Engineer as-a-service

You hired an amazing team with tons of potential. They crave mentorship, want to learn how to become a better version of themselves - while you're dealing with impossible deadlines and requirements that keep piling up. I will apply experience gained leading the Wix Backend Engineering Guild and the Orbs engineering team and help your team members level up on their experience - whether it is software engineering, architecture or leadership.

HIRING

Grow Your Team

I will apply lessons learned from having personally hired over 100 engineers over the past decade, and having led the hiring at the Wix Backend Engineering group and at Orbs.com to your startup. I can help you define your needs and job descriptions, sit in on interviews, help train your interviewers and/or work on your hiring pipeline.

GET MY HANDS DIRTY

Dealing With Your Next Scale

Growth is painful. You've found your market fit and you just spent 6 months on a sprint towards an excellent product. Now it's time to deal with your next scaling issues; maybe you need to break a monolith apart, rethink your architecture, or apply a Continuous Delivery pipeline.

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We'll define a scoped project and I'll step in and clean it up, leaving you with at least a subsystem or a microservice you're proud of. And I can do this paired with one of your engineers, providing mentorship along the way at no additional cost.

GROWTH STRATEGY

See The Forest From The Trees

Successful startups are fast paced, responding to changing markets and constantly honing in on their product and vision. Often this makes it hard to see beyond the next sprint, or maybe quarter. I will apply my experience having helped grow Wix from 20 engineers to 1,000 in multiple sites in Israel and in Europe, and from a monolith to hundreds of microservices, and help you plan (and implement) for the future without leaving money on the table now.

ORBS BLOCKCHAIN NETWORK

2018-2020

I joined Orbs to build the engineering team and bootstrap the software running the Blockchain consensus algorithm. I paired with Orbs' technical co-founder and over a couple of weeks we created, using Test-Driven Development, the skeleton for the Blockchain node, covered by comprehensive E2E tests and by fast, responsive integrative tests. The system is continuously integrated and deployed to a test environment where production-like traffic helps prevent regressions.

WIX BACKEND ENGINEERING GUILD

2013-2017

As Wix grew from 20 to 100 to 1,000 engineers, it was important for me that we retain the essential DNA of what made us an amazing engineering organization. I served an essential role crafting the way the Guild interacts with the functional units at Wix (deemed "Companies" internally), in shaping the Guild's (andthe entire R&D organization) hiring practices and processes, and in instilling a culture of professional growth and excellence.

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I also took an early part in shaping the way Wix Engineering expands abroad into new sites and territories, starting with the Wix Vilnius office, where I spent some time in 2014-2015, and later when strategizing around the idea of a Kyiv office (which became the largest engineering site Wix has outside of Israel).

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Eventually in 2016 I assumed joined leadership of the Backend Engineering Guild, focusing on infrastructure, hiring and guild member professional growth.

WIX STORES

2014-2015

I architected and led the engineering team for Wix Stores, utilizing the Scala language, TDD, microservice architecture and Event Sourcing to create a system that can deal easily both with scale and with the (very rapidly) changing requirements coming from the product team. This architecture proved resilient and survives to this day, and has also become somewhat of a template for other event-sourced solutions at Wix.

MICROSERVICE INFRASTRUCTURE

2011-2014

When I joined Wix, we had 4 server systems, each a monolith in its own domain. I spearheaded the development of Wix's backend microservice infrastructure, and later packed everything nicely so that creating a new microservice at Wix was a matter of class inheritance in Java.

WIX HTML WEBSITE BUILDER

2011-2013

In 2011 Wix decided it's no longer a Flash-based website builder. I served as the lead developer, architect and later team leader for the backend team behind the Wix HTML Website Builder. This entailed major refactoring work to make it possible to serve two types of sites - Flash and HTML, architecting a core system that keeps track of a site's assets, which to this day serves as the beating heart of the Wix Backend, and working with dozens of Javascript developers with a lot requirements, often conflicting.

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During this period I introduced Scala into the Wix Backend group, which quickly became our language of choice for JVM systems, and pioneered the use of TDD at Wix.

CONTACT SHAI