About Emil
Table of Contents
Work #
I lead and advise engineering organizations. My working style prioritizes developing leadership at all levels to facilitate aligned but decentralized execution. Strong engineering fundamentals and people development are what enable teams to deliver high-quality products.
I helped shape the growth of the engineering organization at Toast from ~30 engineers in 2016 to nearly 1000 in 2024. The hypergrowth of the organization involved collaboration with many other leaders to handle:
- recruiting and evolving recruiting practices
- defining the career ladder and promotion process
- the on-call and incident response process
- defining and iterating on global R&D onboarding and enablement
- establishing the Dublin office
I have hired or promoted leaders from new graduates to the director / principal engineer level.
Over my career, my teams have built:
- Internal tooling and training for >500 developers
- Fintech / Payment Processing services supporting >$100m in daily processing volume
- SaaS B2C2B (Sales Enablement products) and B2C (Digital food ordering) products scaling from 10k to 250k WAUs
- Enterprise infrastructure (virtualization and database solutions)
Find more information on LinkedIn.
Academia #
I completed my PhD at MIT’s Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems research group, under Prof. Frans Kaashoek and Prof. Robert T Morris. My research focused on peer-to-peer storage systems, where I was a lead developer of the Chord/DHash distributed hash table.
My interests included practical distributed systems, security, and network measurement.
Music #
I play the piano, with a focus on classical music. I studied at the Manhattan School of Music’s Pre-College Division under Solomon Mikowsky and Robin Freund-Epstein.