Taj Pelc

The Tech Paradigm

Fractional CTO & Strategic Technical Leadership Mentor

Founder — Hands-On → Strategic Coach

MVP Factory

After my journey with Spark Networks, I stepped into the role of Director of Engineering at MVP Factory—a digital agency that partners with both startups and big corporations on a variety of projects, from automotive to healthcare.

In this role, I was responsible for:

✓ Technical oversight of MVPF projects.
I ensured our projects met quality standards and client expectations. This often meant diving into upfront research to pick the right technology for each problem we tackled.

✓ Growing the internal engineering team.
I focused on hiring skilled Engineering Managers and expanding our in-house talent to build a stronger team.

✓ Expanding our network of tech partners.
We collaborated with freelancers and partner agencies, especially focusing on building relationships in Eastern Europe, to enhance our capabilities.

✓ Ensuring competence and leadership across the board.
I made sure we had capable leaders for each project and that our teams operated smoothly.

I aimed for projects to run with minimal involvement from me—empowering Engineering Managers and their teams to take ownership. Success, to me, was when teams were self-reliant and proactive.

Along the way, I learned a ton about sales, the importance of integrated teams, and value-based pricing. One of my proudest achievements was starting a subsidiary in Pakistan, offering European working conditions and above-market rates to attract top talent.

With these experiences under my belt, I decided to take what I knew about building products people love, leveraging technology, and forming effective teams to offer my unique mix of skills more broadly.

Director Of Engineering

Spark Networks

I moved to a bigger city, and my good friend convinced me it should be Berlin, not London.

On lunch with Zoosk's CTO, we discussed the product and how to improve it. It was the perfect opportunity to merge my passion for dating with my experience in technology.

The next day an offer landed on my desk, and I accepted. Two weeks into my new job, COVID-19 hit.

I was a team leader, with 0 people on my team. HR became my best friend. I was scanning a ton of CVs and interviewing plenty. I learned how to hire people remotely; we got up to 8.

The codebase was new to us. My team was afraid to touch it. I set up a build-to-learn loop. We got our hands dirty.

Thanks to my hardworking junior engineer, we shipped the first changes. They were cosmetic, but they made the app look better.

I connected people—the architect to our team, our team with a project team, the product team, and designers to our team. Politics were involved.

I learned a lot during this time. I learned how to manage a team and how to deal with conflict. I learned how to inspire people and show them purpose. I learned how to negotiate with the CTO.

And what helped me during this time was having a fantastic coach.

Technical Team Lead

By this point, I was a solid individual contributor with some team lead experience, a passion for product, and an unhealthy habit of messing with deployment scripts. This is my favorite project of this time.

The team that I joined was small and had an e-sports project. The founders wanted to create a platform that supported fully automated DOTA2 tournaments.

The team was ready to ship, but someone had to upload new versions to make a release manually. Perfect, my pet peeve. I fixed it by configuring AWS, setting up a Docker swarm, and automating it with a dash of bash magic.

I met with the CEO regularly to brainstorm new features and discuss adding new games. I encouraged the product to involve engineering earlier to save time on production-level designs that get gutted by engineers. I proposed how we can increase customer engagement by restricting 1v1 time slots.

And some nights, I did not get much sleep because production broke, and I was the hobby DevOps. Some days I spent optimizing SQL queries. Some days I organized manual testing with 30 hired QAs. And some days, I wrote code.

It's all fair game when you're working at a startup.

I learned how to ship fast, how to pivot quickly, and what makes an efficient team. I learned how to slice up a project and delegate.

And I learned that growing the team could kill your velocity if you are not careful about how you grow it.

The Wild Years of Freelancing

Sportradar AG

I came to replace a team lead on the Mobile API that had just quit. And then the CEO, whose pet project this was leaving too. The app was full of bugs. It was often failing.

There was no product owner. It was the perfect opportunity for what I love to do.

I started drilling:
Who are the users?
What do they find valuable?
How much are they paying?
How many costs are we incurring?
What should we be pricing the product?
What feature levels do we want to offer?

The process was uncomfortable but necessary. I took the learnings and worked with our regional CEO to develop the pricing models.

I worked with the copywriter to create a new presentation page and adjust the messaging with my team to build and deploy it.

A fantastic engineer Dime joined my team for the rewrite. He identified the valuable core feature set and did the architecture. We rewrote it as a collection of microservices tied together with RabbitMQ. We had tests.

I used my hobby DevOps skills, and one late afternoon we sat down with Dime and shipped it. It worked. It was fast. It was stable.

Tech Lead

Flaviar

My first startup. The grind. I was young and passionate.

I used my DevOps hobby to migrate the development environment to Vagrant to make spinning it up for a new developer easy. I also wrote the deployment scripts and handled AWS.

I was the only one on the backend for a time, so I wrote the Flaviar API the external mobile team integrated into the native app to list drinks, make purchases and display the flavor spiral. I integrated Stripe, PayPal, Klarna, and Sofort and became a payment connoisseur.

Eventually, I got my buddy Denis on board, and he took over the architecture work and the heavy lifting on the backend.

I was a good buddy with the Customer Success team and the designers. I wanted to fix the product. I had ideas; I pitched them hard.

Eventually, I got offered a VP role to organize dev work. I turned it down. I wanted to increase the value to the customer. Unless you build the right thing, no amount of engineering efficiency gets you the growth that you need.

Senior Developer

Httpool

After finishing my Master's, I got a job at Httpool. I was eager to apply my organizational skills in a role more aligned with that. I migrated us to Jira and set up the workflows.

But that did not last. There was no space for a scrum master on that team. Everyone was hands-on, so I went back to writing code. I found my good buddy Denis here. He taught me TDD, APIs, services, and design patterns and deepened my knowledge of Javascript.

I was responsible for integrating the Facebook Ads API. Facebook was investing heavily in ads and pushing new features hard. Breaking changes every three months. It felt like I was constantly playing catch-up.

My best buddies were the marketing team—our users. If the system failed to sync their ads, they talked to me. I fixed problems and pushed for improvements.

I fell in love with product work and building something people want to use. Working closely with our UX designer inspired me. I learned a lot about building interfaces. And when a new opportunity appeared, I followed him to a startup.

3fs d.o.o.

My first job. I got it because I worked on side projects at Uni, building websites for fun and sometimes profit. You know, made by your cousin type of quality.

My boss David was tough on me. But he was an excellent teacher. He taught me OOP, SQL, and how to separate logic from presentation. It was intense, but I learned quickly.

He taught me to ship things features fast but test them properly.

I learned to be a decent junior, banging out features. I messed up a lot. Sometimes in production. I got the Czech flag a lot.

But I went from working on side projects to working on the company's main cash cow.

I wrote a few backend services—my first ones. I learned a lot from more experienced peers. I did a few all-nighters.

And then, I left for my Masters's degree. Richer for a good experience. My time in 3fs was short, but it kickstarted my career.

Junior Web Developer

I help overwhelmed, hands-on CTOs become strategic leaders | Fractional Executive | Tinkerer

Are you in a tech leadership role, but the thought of leaving your laptop for a few days terrifies you?

I help you move from being too hands-on to leading strategically by building a team you can trust with initiatives that matter.
 
Here's the problem:

Your team relies on you for every decision.
You can't remember your last uninterrupted day off.
You're drowning in code reviews and production issues.

Sounds familiar? I've been there. Now I guide tech leaders like you from hands-on coding to high-impact strategy.

What we'll tackle:

Building self-sufficient teams.
Aligning tech initiatives with business goals.
Creating systems that don't need constant babysitting.
Communicating effectively with the C-suite and stakeholders.

Result? You'll lead more, code less, and, yes – take that vacation without your laptop.

Ready to level up? DM me: "I'm done traveling with my laptop."

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