Ric Szopa
Engineering Manager at szopa.io
Warsaw, Masovian Voivodeship, Poland
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRic Szopa is an engineering manager and seasoned technology leader with 18 years of experience building and scaling engineering teams and infrastructure, currently leading the Storage Infrastructure team for Asana in Warsaw. He combines deep distributed-systems expertise from Google—where he worked on Vitess and YouTube reliability projects including a distributed rate limiter—with hands-on startup and CTO experience growing a computer-vision shop that was later acquired. As Affirm’s Director of Engineering and Poland site lead he founded and scaled the local office to over 100 people, shaping hiring, employer brand, and vendor strategy across the region. He advises startups and VCs through szopa.io and prior roles, translating technical due diligence into practical growth plans. Known for pragmatic engineering judgment and improving observability (e.g., Prometheus instrumentation contributions to YouTube tooling), he pairs low-level systems knowledge with deep market insight into the Polish tech ecosystem. Fluent at bridging US and Polish operations, he’s equally comfortable in on-call incident rooms, boardrooms, and in the codebase.
18 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Erasmus exchange Philosophy/Artificial Intelligence, Erasmus exchange Philosophy/Artificial Intelligence at KU LeuvenIII Liceum Ogólnokształcące im. Marynarki Wojennej RP w GdyniMA (unfinished) Philosophy, MA (unfinished) Philosophy at University of Warsaw
Polish, English, Spanish, Italian, Russian
Stackoverflow
5,461reputation
918kreached
14answers
21questions
Github Skills (13)
go10
protocol-buffers10
prometheus9
server-configuration8
ide6
linux6
prolog6
common-lisp6
sql6
postgresql6
lisp6
database6
cascade6
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
youtube/doorman
Jan 2016 - May 2016
Doorman: Global Distributed Client Side Rate Limiting.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:59 commits, 5 PRs, 38 pushes in 3 months
Contributions summary:Ric primarily focused on refactoring and improving comments within the codebase, specifically in the protocol buffer definitions and generated Go code related to the Doorman service. They made small changes to the Doorman server, including adding a redirect and allowing for server ID configuration. Furthermore, the user contributed to setting up Prometheus instrumentation for the client and server, improving monitoring capabilities. The contributions demonstrate a focus on code quality, server configuration, and observability.
golangclient-sidedoormanrate-limitinglimiting
ryszard/python-netflix
Jun 2009 - Jun 2010
Contributions:37 commits in 1 year
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.