Summary
Dan Berko is a Senior Lead Software Engineer with 14 years building and operating high-traffic publishing platforms that serve 100M+ monthly users across major media brands. He blends hands-on full-stack craftsmanship with platform-level leadership—modernizing legacy WordPress ecosystems, executing zero-downtime migrations (PHP 8 across 28 sites), and shipping AI-assisted editorial tools that respect newsroom workflows and privacy. Known for pragmatic engineering under production pressure, he drives measurable wins in performance, monetization, and editorial productivity while mentoring teams and acting as a first responder on-call. Comfortable across front-end, back-end, and data integrations (WordPress, BigQuery, Google Analytics), he partners closely with editorial and business stakeholders to deliver durable, maintainable systems. A former newsroom technologist, he brings an uncommon combination of newsroom empathy and platform engineering rigor to complex, deadline-driven environments.
14 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
BS Journalism, BS Journalism at Northwestern University