Summary
Ray Slakinski is a seasoned engineering leader with 16 years of experience building and scaling highly reliable platforms, from early startups to services serving 80M+ monthly visitors. Currently Senior Engineering Manager for SRE at ecobee, he focuses on keeping millions of connected devices running securely and comfortably around the clock while leading Kubernetes migrations across hybrid on‑prem and cloud environments. Ray blends hands‑on architecture and incident work with team development, clear cross‑team direction, and practical approaches to technical debt. His background includes founding‑stage engineering and infrastructure work—scaling Mahalo to 17M uniques and building real‑time feeds and Cassandra-backed stores for high throughput systems. He’s equally comfortable prototyping new products and institutionalizing bulletproof operations, and is known for moving teams off brittle tooling toward repeatable, automated delivery. Based in Oakville, Ontario, he pairs deep operational instincts with a bias for learning fast and shipping durable solutions.
16 years of coding experience
28 years of employment as a software developer
Sheridan College