Product Development Lifecycle
Owning delivery from idea to production release, with sound architecture and engineering practices built in.
Atanas Gizdov
Engineer
About Me
What have I done?
Years of experience in technology
15
College degrees
3
Businesses founded
1
Users satisfied
∞
Where else to find me
Who am I?
My name is Atanas Gizdov and I am the best hiring decision your company will make this year.
With over 15 years of experience, I have delivered dozens of high profile programs to market as a Technical Program Manager, Engineer and Technical leader.
Whether you are looking for someone to manage large scale, complex technical initiatives, help you adopt the latest AI technologies or grow your data and infrastructure solutions, my deep experience in all of these areas will be a strong asset to your team and I look forward to working together.
Here are just a few examples of the immediate impact I can have at your company:
- Deliver technical initiatives of any scale ahead of schedule. My latest projects include architectural overhauls with dozens of stakeholders across 10,000+ servers, reaching millions of users worldwide
- Cut compliance cost by 75% (~$250M savings in fines) through programmatic data purpose enforcement development of privacy-aware infrastructure at a scale of 2B+ transactions per minute. This first-of-its-kind technology has since been published as a breakthrough innovation for Meta
- Bring a CTO's mindset - I am a co-founder of NR Technologies, an AI-first software business with the goal of bringing the power of AI to everyday people
Skills
Software Development
Hands-on engineering background that spots problems early and keeps code quality rising instead of piling up tech debt.
AI-First Data Infrastructure
Building data platforms at scale on AWS, Kubernetes and Spark, with cloud costs kept firmly in check.
Release Management
Turning release chaos into a predictable sprint-and-release cadence, including a 3x faster release schedule at Lanyon.
Cross-functional Teams
Aligning dozens of stakeholders with clear direction so engineering can focus on shipping.
Tools
Jira, Confluence, Grafana, Datadog, Tableau and more, used well, which is often half the battle.
Experience
Zscaler
Senior Staff Technical Program Manager
Private ZIA Infrastructure
- Own the full infrastructure deployment lifecycle for ZIA Private Service Edge customers, from architecture to deployment. This high-impact role is the glue between Sales, Engineering and customers and directly enables $500M+ of annual revenue
- Help new and existing customers design and implement complex networking solutions, including zero-trust architecture, subnet configuration and custom proxy configurations on a per-cluster basis
Fortinet
Staff Technical Program Manager
Data Infrastructure and AI Platform
- Lead TPM for the FortiCNAPP cloud security platform, driving 0-1 technical programs across Engineering, Product, DevOps and more
- Delivered a 40% cloud operating cost reduction, an annual savings of over $15M, by creating and leading the Engineering Org's #1 priority program - a complete re-architecture of the company's data backbone, migrating from Snowflake to a custom-built Spark/EKS Data Lake
Staff Technical Program Manager
Data Privacy
- Drove development of privacy-aware infrastructure at a scale of 2B+ transactions per minute. This technology has since been published as a breakthrough innovation for Meta
- Cut compliance cost by 75% (~$250M savings in fines) through programmatic data purpose enforcement
- Defined roadmaps, metrics, and cross-org risk frameworks enabling simultaneous execution of multiple infra programs
Akamai
Senior Technical Program Manager
Edge Infrastructure
- Led re-architecture of Edge Caching, improving eviction performance 15% and reducing congestion-related incidents by 10%
- Partnered with engineering leadership to scale CDN & Security infra by 20% across global edge footprint
- Automated inter-team workflows via a Python/JIRA API tool, improving request SLA metrics and boosting engineering velocity
Akamai
Technical Program Manager
Internal Tools
- Managed development of NOCC tools for 1,000+ DevOps and NOCC engineers, reducing incident volume by 12%
- Performed interim dev manager duties for 10 months
- Improved key metrics (code coverage, incident reduction, developer velocity) by 10-25%, shaping infra investment strategy
- Contributed hands-on development in Python/Flask/Postgres (~30% of time)
Cvent
Technical Program Manager
- Owned engineering backlog, releases, and CI/CD overhaul for the Tourism and Events product, reducing production issues by 35% while increasing recurring revenue by 20%
- Introduced Agile/Scrum practices as certified Scrum Product Owner and improved development team velocity by 50%
- Achieved Scrum Alliance certification as a Technical Product/Program owner
Cvent
Software Engineer
- Active development for the Cvent tourism and travel suite, including building external APIs, tuning and optimizing databases and building scalable infrastructure in a high-throughput, transactional stack
- Built and maintained Java test suites with Cucumber automation, creating 100% automation coverage across the product
- Cut deployment failures 75% through improved release automation
- Reduced customer-found bugs by 45%
Liberty Mutual
Software Engineer
- On-call and production support for the Sales Compensation team, ensuring all reports for the company are produced in a timely and accurate manner
- Maintained and upgraded the critical Sales Compensation suite (Oracle 8 → Oracle 11)
- Provided global production support for a mission-critical app
Education
“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” – Benjamin Franklin
BS in Economics
Minors in Computer Science and Psychology
University of Massachusetts – Amherst
Masters in Business Administration
Major in Computer Science
Bentley University
AI Graduate Certificate
Focus on AI, ML and Data Systems at Scale
Harvard Extension School
Get in touch
Thank you for visiting my site. Looking forward to meeting you!