MD Mars DepinskiFractional CTO & Technology Advisor Book an intro call

Two careers, one engagement

Experience

My background runs on two tracks that a fractional CTO engagement needs together: the technical track — still comfortable in the code, the terminal and the cloud console — and the leadership track — org design, hiring, budget ownership and reporting to VPs and the C-suite. The resumes below are the source material for engagements; the numbers are real.

Track record

Nov 2019 – presentSr. Director / Director of Engineering
UnitedHealth Group — Optum Digital / Rally Health · San Francisco, CA

Software delivery ownership for 4–8 teams and 60 engineers across payments, rewards, member portal and mobile. Led a platform-architecture strategy around resilience, performance, quality and cost with a ~$20M annual budget; drove SRE culture and measurable SLA/SLO improvement for services serving millions of members. Hired and mentored both managers and ICs across US, India and the Philippines. Promoted from leading a single team to multiple initiatives.

Feb – Nov 2019Senior Software Development Manager
Appetize, LLC · Los Angeles, CA

Owned delivery for a 35-person payment and integration team across 7 countries — back-end services in PHP and Golang, mobile apps on Android/iOS. Set hiring standards and ran the interview loop; provided architectural direction and estimates; pushed projects to production.

2017 – 2018Principal Engineer
Women.com, LLC · Los Angeles, CA

Built a unified BI reporting system over 50+ APIs at hourly granularity, defining the company's core KPIs. Built a real-time ad-bidding platform that raised revenue over 40% and cut malicious-ad impact. Migrated the stack from AWS/Heroku to GCP: −80% cost, higher performance. Tuned the site from 7s to 2s page load.

2014 – 2017Director of Engineering
Graflo LLC · Warsaw, Poland

Software development and IT advisory for banking, insurance and fintech clients: security and usability audits of banking systems, custom integrations for regulated financial companies, managed developers and sysadmins, owned client and vendor relationships.

2013 – 2015Chief Technology Officer
Creamfinance, LLC · Prague, Czech Republic

Built a 20-person engineering organization across six countries — IT, PMO, BI, QA and development. Set up two redundant OpenStack data centers for a short-term loan platform; delivered the custom loan-management platform; managed IT across 7 offices and 500+ users.

2012 – 2014Chief Technology Officer
GlobalTransfers · Warsaw, Poland

Brought in to deliver a currency-exchange system connecting two dozen domestic and foreign banks — architecture, delivery ownership, and the technical relationship with banking partners.

Earlier: systems engineering and consulting roles in media, education and online advertising, 1998–2013. M.S. Computer Science (Multimedia & Creative Technologies specialization), University of Southern California; B.S. Computer Science, USC.

What this means for your company

Companies don't hire me for a job title. They hire the combination: someone who can defend an architecture to a board, price it honestly, hire the people who will own it — and still open the terminal when it matters.

  • Comfortable owning a $20M budget and defending a $15K tool purchase.
  • Equally at home in an architecture review, a compliance audit, or a hiring debrief.
  • Used to being the most senior technical decision-maker in the room — and documenting why.