Petr Hanák
I have led numerous successful software projects and built companies from the ground up. With a strong background in both product management and software engineering, I’m uniquely positioned to turn ideas into products, communicate that vision to the team, and dive into technical details when necessary. I’m equally comfortable engaging directly with B2B customers and finalizing technical aspects of deals brought in by sales. My approach is data-driven, and I prioritize fostering team collaboration and cross-departmental connection through efficient internal processes. I’m also committed to going the extra mile—whether that’s transitioning development teams from an agency model to an in-house structure, or handling the creation of necessary legal documentation.
I have built and consecutively led three teams, comprising over 20 people, to successfully deliver complex features to customers over several years. I managed the monthly budget, estimated costs and timelines, and regularly assessed and adjusted future projections based on team velocity. New business requirements were consistently met within weeks, with approximately 90% delivered on time. My cost predictions for new features were highly accurate, deviating by less than 7% from initial estimates. I prioritize team collaboration, with sprint retrospectives consistently reflecting high levels of team satisfaction, often scoring between 8-9/10.
I design complex systems that integrate applications, security, infrastructure, and graphics, with each element playing a key role in shaping the overall architecture. I also manage department-wide processes, set guidelines, enforce code review policies, and support unit testing to ensure continuous delivery, consistent progress, and high-quality outcomes. Whenever possible, I follow industry standards and structure the application to facilitate smooth handovers of the codebase. The architecture includes both legacy systems and new components, with plans for future growth and system expansion.
I bring several years of experience in developing software across multiple languages and frameworks for diverse use cases. I have built numerous API services using various protocols, including low-level TCP/IP and serial communication with hardware, as well as low-latency event-based solutions for instant messaging with on-the-fly translation, and camera video streaming with playback. Additionally, I have developed a wide range of UI applications for web, mobile, desktop, and kiosk PCs. Beyond coding, I have managed both on-premises applications and containerized cloud solutions across various cloud providers.
After successfully handing over the project at agency, an agreement was made to transfer half of the current development team in-house. I coordinated this transition, which involved drafting legal contracts with developers, transferring ownership of cloud resources, and establishing internal operational processes. Throughout the migration, development continued with regular release cycles and no disruption.
I began working on a proof-of-concept project focused on luggage storage, where my responsibilities included API development, POS terminal integration and certification, as well as Linux customization for kiosk use. After launch, the project scope expanded to three teams that I was leading until project handover.
Designed architecture of a distributed parcel delivery system designed with an architecture capable of scaling to thousands of locations. I led three teams covering software architecture, analysis, and eventually project management.
Within six months, the first version was released in partnership with Czech Post, followed by a nationwide rollout to hundreds of locations. By the end of the year, we had completed the initial project scope, which included advanced customer flows for luggage storage and content handover, as well as new services such as history auditing, call center support, and device management— all integrated with central identity and role-based access control (RBAC).
Transition to in-house team followed and as a result, both the internal and external teams consistently received high ratings in sprint retrospectives (team happiness scores of 8-9/10). New business requirements were met within weeks, with approximately 90% delivered on time. The actual cost of new features was predicted with less than 5% deviation from initial estimates.
I contributed to the company's growth from 3 to over 20 people, building processes from the ground up, including estimation guidelines, hiring procedures, and mentoring junior developers. As the lead DevOps engineer, I managed cloud resources for both internal and external client projects on GCP and Azure. I played a key role in major technology decisions, such as adopting .NET, Kubernetes, and Angular. I also developed a proof of concept mobile app, which led to a long-term partnership with the client and became a significant revenue stream for the agency.
The client approached us with a 12-year-old system built on Symfony 1, running on a VPS, alongside a React Native mobile application, both of which were no longer maintained. I led the project, overseeing the development of the React Native app and working on a new Nest.js API, as well as managing the migration to the cloud. The mobile app was restructured to support multiple platforms, with approximately 80% of the codebase shared between mobile and the new web app, including styles. I containerized legacy backend services and migrated them to Kubernetes on GCP. Over the course of several days, we successfully migrated the database (30GB+ MySQL) and files (400GB+) to the cloud with zero downtime.
During my time at the agency, I worked as part of several teams as well as independently on various projects, all focused on delivering MVPs under tight deadlines. The web applications were built using React with SSR support. For two of these projects, I migrated the build system to improve performance and enable better data preloading. In addition to development work, I contributed to internal and public presentations and meetups, helping to expand the company’s knowledge through research, tooling, and documentation.
I joined a client’s internal team on-site in California, where I worked on an autonomous checkout system with custom patented hardware integrations and cameras. This system was developed as microservices in Golang, leveraging the gRPC protocol. I was in charge of live video streaming service tracking customers as a part of team responsible for verification by humans in realtime, necessary in early stage of AI tracking.
After a few months, we made successful demo of the system to investors, which led to a one-year contract for continued collaboration with the agency. Project is live in several countries and directly competes with Amazon Go.
As a contractor, my responsibility was to develop data mining and processing software that extracted product metadata and automatically associated items from PDF leaflets. I also conducted research on detecting the dominant color of clothing from images and implemented a multiclass, multi-label classification system for product category suggestions.
As an input I received unstructured data in pdf files, hundreds of pages containing thousands of products with infographic mixed around. As a result products were reduced to few hundreds after grouping. Tool I developed made qualified guess of the bounding box based on nearby product positions, images, prices etc. Products were fulltext paired into current database with ~80% accuracy improving over time. Product metadata were normalized and prepared for import into admin for manual check.
Duration of those project was ranging from smaller for few days up to several months building MVP for a client. Some interesting situations that I was solving: video export directly from browser using WASM, migration of build on web project with 100+ LoC in a single repository, migration to next.js with SSR optimization, VM image customization and provisioning of virtual desktops.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/petr-hanak/