Rodoljub Petrović
⚲ Ljubljana, Slovenia (EU)
Hello. My name is Rodoljub (Rod-all-yoob) but most people give up after Rod. I’m a developer. I develop and scale software products (across the stack) and teams that develop and scale software products.
I’ve been programming since I was 9, professionally since 1999. Since 2006, I’ve been in different leadership roles, most notably VPE at Celtra (#adtech, ⚲ Boston) and Head of Software at Turtl (#martech, ⚲ London), two B2B startups that grew from 0 to $100M+ while I was there.
Experience
01.2015 → 04.2022
Head of Software @ Turtl
⚲ London, UK (remote)
Engineer #1 turned technology lead in a London-based MarTech startup. I developed and scaled the product (a PDF alternative with authoring tools and analytics) and the team behind it. I eventually managed 20 people across 4 teams and was involved in both pre-sales and post-sales communication with customers such as Cisco, Bloomberg and Amazon.
- Management
- Hiring
- JavaScript
- TypeScript
- Angular
- NodeJS
- MongoDB
- AWS
- EC2
- Lambda
- Kinesis
- S3
- Athena
03.2014 → 10.2014
Chief Technology Officer @ TVbeat
⚲ Ljubljana, Slovenia
Brought in as CTO after the seed round to hire an engineering team and ship a predefined roadmap (“Google Analytics for IPTV“) in 6 months. I was able to recruit 5 senior engineers within 3 months. We went on a death march and managed to develop a demoable version, but not releasable. We all got fired after 6-8 months. It was a terrible but sobering experience.
- Management
- Hiring
- JavaScript
- NodeJS
- MongoDB
- AWS
- EC2
- Kinesis
- S3
05.2010 → 09.2013
VP of Engineering @ Celtra
⚲ Ljubljana, Slovenia
Joined a Boston-based AdTech startup as VPE, just as it decided to pivot and develop a new product for mobile (rich media ads with authoring tools and analytics), which I immediately started working on. Initially, our direct competition was Apple with iAd. As the company grew, I continued to write code across the stack, as well as hire and manage 20+ engineers.
- Management
- Hiring
- JavaScript
- CSS
- NodeJS
- PHP
- MySQL
- AWS
02.2008 → 04.2010
Lead Developer @ Parsek
⚲ Ljubljana, Slovenia
Started as a senior engineer in a local consultancy and soon got promoted to the lead of one of their two departments. I worked on the largest projects: first an e-banking application and then a custom CMS for a popular news portal (where I implemented a recommender system based on Collaborative Filtering). I also helped engineers on other projects.
- JavaScript
- CSS
- Java
- JBoss
- Ruby
- Rails
- PostgreSQL
01.2005 → 01.2008
Lead Developer @ Intera
⚲ Ptuj, Slovenia
Started working remotely as a web developer for a small Slovenian consultancy. A few months in, I developed the first version of a CRM application, which showed a lot of promise. Within a year, the company pivoted into SaaS and I moved to Slovenia, becoming the lead engineer, developing the product further and managing a team of 4 engineers.
- JavaScript
- CSS
- PHP
- PostgreSQL
01.2004 → 10.2004
Web Developer @ Extreme
⚲ Belgrade, Serbia
- JavaScript
- CSS
- PHP
- ASP
- .NET
- C#
- SQL Server
09.2002 → 08.2003
Web Developer @ Eutelnet
⚲ Belgrade, Serbia
- JavaScript
- CSS
- PHP
- MySQL
09.1999 → 12.2005
Web Developer @ Freelance
⚲ Belgrade, Serbia
Whenever I had time between studying and working full-time, I developed whatever anyone was willing to pay for. Mostly web sites and CMS.
- JavaScript
- CSS
- ASP
- Visual Basic
- PHP
- MySQL
Education
2008 → 2010
M.Sc. ICT @ IPS "Jožef Stefan"
⚲ Ljubljana, Slovenia
Completed a 4-semester curriculum towards a research-based Masters degree in Information and Communication Technologies. The main focus of the studies was Machine Learning. I passed all the exams and published one research paper at an international conference, but stopped short of finishing my thesis (babies and startups being the excuse). GPA 9.4/10
- Text mining
- Data mining
- Semantic Web
- Social network analysis
2000 → 2005
B.Sc. Computer Science @ VISER
⚲ Belgrade, Serbia
Completed a 7-semester Computer Science curriculum and graduated with 180 ECTS credits. I was very active in the AI class, especially in Knowledge Representation and the Semantic Web. My graduation thesis “Searching the Semantic Web” was graded 10/10. GPA 8.7/10
- Computer Science
- Programming
- AI
1998 → 1999
Honours Diploma @ St. Clairsville High School
⚲ St. Clairsville OH, USA
I spent my senior year of high school in a small town in Ohio, where I won a silver medal in the state basketball competition and graduated with honours. But not before I perfected my English and met many new friends.
Achievements
(noteworthy or at least interesting)
- Father of two naughty kids and husband to their patient mom ❤️
- I have recruited 5 former colleagues in a new role and 2 former schoolmates
- I have gone through 5 rounds of investment at two startups, 2x seed, 2x A and 1x B
- I speak English, Slovene and Serbian fluently
- I’ve given talks at tech events in Ljubljana, Belgrade and London. The largest audience was ~300 people.
- Occassional op-ed writer at Finance (the Slovenian FT) since 2019, writing about technology, management, business and politics
- Innovation award from the Slovenian Chamber of Commerce and Industry in 2007 for Intrix CRM (while at Intera)
- Presidential award for academic achievement in 1999, in the US (not as noteworthy as it sounds, but it does sound noteworthy)
- At 16, I played basketball professionally in the very competitive first league of Serbia (was mostly on the bench, but still…)
- At 15, I was selected as one of the top 16 basketball players for the Serbian national cadet team
- At 13, I acted in a youth theatre play that won an award
- At 12, I wrote the script for a school play that won an award
- At 11, I won in a math competition
- At 9, I wrote my first lines of code, in BASIC, on Commodore 64 ❤️, and even managed to make a (boring) game
- I was born in 1981 in Belgrade, Serbia
- You’ve seriously read all that? Thank you! I’m honoured.