Warsaw, Poland

Robert Podwika

Senior Engineering Manager

AI Adoption · Cloud Architecture · Engineering Leadership

Engineering leader with 18+ years building cloud-native platforms and high-performing teams. Led AI adoption, AWS modernization, and organizational leadership at scale.

Get in touch
18+ Years experience
~60% AWS cost reduction
10x Throughput increase
100+ Office employees led

About

I lead engineering teams that ship on AWS and treat AI as how the work gets done — not a side project. I stay hands-on with Go, Node.js, and AWS, while managing teams, leading projects, and running the Warsaw office.

AI Leadership

Adoption across 2 teams (scaling 8 to 16+): search, monitoring, meeting intelligence, and hiring evaluation.

Cloud and AWS

~60% AWS cost reduction, 10x live throughput, org-wide CDK adoption.

Org Leadership

Warsaw Office Lead for 100+ employees, with a shared operating framework for ownership and delivery.

Core Expertise

AI Leadership

  • Championed AI adoption with Cursor-based plan-driven development across 2 engineering teams
  • Accountable for AISA — an inherited AWS Bedrock AI Search Agent on marketplace.sportradar.com; leading its transition into my team's ownership
  • Inspired and led the team during Make It Better to build Play-by-Play AI monitoring for NFL/NBA discrepancy detection, and helped bring it to production
  • Built AWS Bedrock candidate evaluation for coding academy hiring (200+ submissions) with automated ranking and PDF feedback

Engineering Management

  • Lead 2 teams (8 direct reports, scaling to 16+) across NFL, NBA, NHL, and NCAA products
  • Established engineering operating framework: ownership, governance, ADRs, accountability
  • Warsaw Office Lead for 100+ employees — relocation, executive events, cross-functional ops

Cloud & AWS

  • Reduced AWS costs ~60% and proxy infrastructure costs >50% through architecture optimization
  • Increased live processing throughput 10x (1K to 10K records/sec), 7 months incident-free
  • Led org-wide AWS CDK adoption; delivered first CDK + Go production service

Experience

Senior Engineering Manager / Office Lead

Sportradar

May 2018 – Present · Warsaw

AI Leadership

  • Championed AI adoption across 2 engineering teams (8 engineers, scaling to 16+), establishing Cursor-based plan-driven development and structured team experimentation
  • Accountable for AISA, an inherited AWS Bedrock AI Search Agent for marketplace.sportradar.com; leading the transition into my team's ownership
  • Inspired and led the team during Make It Better to build Play-by-Play — AI monitoring for NFL/NBA play-event discrepancies — and helped bring it to production
  • Deployed AI meeting summarization (Bedrock + Lambda + S3) with 100% team adoption — eliminated repeat meetings and strengthened technical records
  • Built AWS Bedrock candidate evaluation platform for coding academy hiring (200+ solutions and applications), with automated ranking and personalized PDF feedback

Platform & Impact

  • Reduced AWS operational costs ~60% and proxy infrastructure costs >50%
  • Increased live data-processing throughput 10x while achieving 7 consecutive months without production incidents
  • Led organization-wide AWS CDK adoption; delivered first CDK + Go production service
  • Improved critical business KPIs: NFL closing times -13%, NCAA Football closing times -14%

Org Leadership

  • Built and lead 2 high-performing engineering teams delivering Sports Media Monitoring platforms across NFL, NBA, NHL, and NCAA
  • Established engineering operating framework improving team autonomy and decision quality across Warsaw office
  • Selected as Warsaw Office Lead (100+ employees); orchestrated office relocation and cross-functional coordination
  • Delivered NFL, NBA, and NHL monitoring initiatives ~1 month ahead of schedule

Lead JavaScript / TypeScript Developer

Sportradar

Sep 2015 – May 2018 · Warsaw

Built React/Redux/GraphQL applications and REST/GraphQL backend services; contributed to platform architecture and TypeScript adoption.

Earlier Career (2008 – 2015)
  • Syndra Programming Services — Owner (2014 – 2015): Software architecture, development, and consulting
  • Ars Thanea — Senior PHP Developer (2014 – 2015): High-traffic platforms with Symfony and Silex
  • Agencja Interaktywna Rolkaart — Senior Software Developer (2010 – 2013): Full-stack PHP and C# applications
  • Chariot — PHP Developer (2008 – 2010): E-commerce and social networking with Zend Framework

Skills

AI & Innovation

  • AWS Bedrock
  • AI Agent Architecture
  • LLM Integration
  • Cursor
  • Plan-Driven Development
  • AI Adoption Strategy
  • Natural Language Search
  • Anomaly Detection
  • Automated Assessment
  • Code Review Automation

Leadership

  • Engineering Management
  • Team Building
  • Office Leadership
  • Strategic Planning
  • Stakeholder Management
  • Budget Planning
  • Roadmap Delivery
  • Engineering Governance

Cloud & Infrastructure

  • Lambda
  • CDK
  • ECS
  • Kinesis
  • DynamoDB
  • EventBridge
  • SQS
  • Cognito
  • IoT Core
  • Bedrock
  • Serverless
  • Infrastructure as Code
  • Event-Driven Architecture
  • CI/CD
  • Observability
  • Platform Engineering

Languages & Frameworks

  • Go
  • TypeScript
  • Node.js
  • React
  • GraphQL
  • PHP/Symfony

Contact

Open to Director of Engineering, Head of Engineering, and senior engineering leadership roles.

Prefer LinkedIn for first contact. Email is included on the downloadable CV.