Profile

Senior Engineering Manager with over 15 years in software engineering, including 7+ years in engineering leadership roles. At Grafana Labs, I’ve led teams through complex transitions, from multi-team mergers to org design shifts and roadmap resets – while maintaining performance and clarity. I focus on making principled decisions, mentoring new leaders, and creating grounded, resilient teams.
My leadership philosophy: build trust, move with intention, and do the right thing – even when it’s hard.

Work Experience

Grafana Labs (Remote, Berlin)

Senior Engineering Manager — June 2024 to Present

• Built and led the Authentication and Authorization function at Grafana Labs, scaling to a 15-person cross-functional org.
• Started hands-on with no team and bootstrapped delivery of core features like RBAC and Unified SSO.
• Shipped production-grade RBAC in 2 months with only 2 engineers.
• Founded Grafana AuthNZ and unified three auth-related teams under one platform org.
• Mentored a senior engineer into a manager role and introduced RFC-based decision-making.

SoundCloud (Berlin)

Engineering Manager, Data Platform — Feb 2020 to Nov 2020
Senior Data Engineer / Senior Software Engineer — Mar 2017 to Jan 2020

• Led platform team supporting self-serve data access and GCP migration.
• Designed and built the Stats product for artists on SoundCloud.

Friendsurance (Berlin)

Team Lead / Senior Software Engineer — Nov 2013 to Feb 2017

• Started and scaled mobile engineering team.
• Led development of internal tooling and customer support systems.

Essential Solution Ltd. (Yerevan)

Software Engineer — Jun 2012 to Oct 2013

• First engineer on RollUp Media platform, scaled team to 7, and led feature delivery.

be2 Ltd. (Yerevan)

Junior Software Engineer — Jun 2008 to Jun 2010

• Integrated multiple payment providers and improved test automation for transaction systems.

Technical Skills

• Languages: Go, Java, Scala, Typescript
• Infrastructure: AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, Docker
• Data: Kafka, Airflow, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Cassandra
• IAM: OAuth, SAML, SCIM, JWT, LDAP, RBAC

Education

State Engineering University of Armenia – Bachelor’s in Information Systems (2006 – 2010)

Courses and Training

• Business Communication Booster – American University of Armenia (2009)
• Scrum Training – agile42 GmbH (2009)
• Web Development – Lycos Armenia (2007–2008)

Languages

English (fluent), Russian (fluent), German (intermediate), Armenian (native)