Andrew Katsikas
apkatsikas AT gmail DOT com |
katsikas-dev.newhellstudios.com
Software Engineer with over 15 years of experience building, testing and operating production systems across the full stack. Published contributor to CNCF ecosystem projects.
Professional Experience
Pelotech
Remote
Senior Software Engineer
Feb 2026 – Present
- Lead zero-downtime migration from Ingress NGINX to Envoy Gateway for a production customer on AWS, using weighted DNS via Route 53 and ExternalDNS with no customer disruption.
- Publish technical case studies including a post accepted to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation blog. Co-host webinars and help build marketing pages to launch migration services as a new business line.
- Contribute upstream to Envoy Gateway, cert-manager and Kubernetes Gateway API to support ListenerSet adoption and fix controller issues discovered during migration work.
- Reduce page load time by 5x by identifying and removing unnecessary hydration on a non-existent record.
- Implement PostgREST row-level and table-level security policies. Configure Keycloak advanced scripting with init containers for JWT customization to support PostgREST role extraction.
- Lead multiplayer event system delivery, improving schema design and test coverage after ramping up quickly on the domain.
- Add ratchet system to prevent growth of TypeScript errors, tracking error codes per package to ensure counts only decrease.
- Refactor React frontend to MVVM architecture. Build frontend unit tests using React Testing Library.
- Fix KIND setup for latest manifest/image changes. Empower developers to use DR backups from test environments locally.
- Diagnose and resolve production issues using Grafana logging, including a tricky first-of-the-month date bug across front and backend and an out-of-sync race condition.
- Oversee production releases and triage Severity 2 bugs.
Vimeo
NYC, NY
Senior Software Engineer — Player Backend
Jan 2025 – Jan 2026
- Built async, event-driven PHP processors ensuring GDPR compliance for thousands of customers.
- Designed RESTful API features for caption services using Go, BigTable, and PHP, affecting millions of videos.
- Analyzed and remediated issue reports across multiple Go services, fixing bugs affecting millions of users.
- Enhanced caption service event-driven flow to capture vendor data for competitive analysis using Go and Pub/Sub.
Principal Software Development Engineer in Test
Feb 2022 – Jan 2025
- Migrated company (12 suites) from BrowserStack to auto-scaling Jenkins/GitHub Actions workers using Playwright, saving $60k/year with 4x faster execution and 5x reliability improvement.
- Moved WebStream service onto "V3" platform using Terraform and Kubernetes.
- Built deployment tools enhancing Jenkins/Slack flow. Held weekly Office Hours for company-wide support.
- Designed interview materials and conducted technical assessments, resulting in a successful senior hire.
- Built Accessibility UI tests to identify WCAG violations and remediated via site fixes.
Senior Software Development Engineer in Test
Apr 2019 – Feb 2022
- Built WebStream, an internal Go web server providing 24/7 live playback health monitoring for Vimeo streams.
- Built HTTP integration tests for video transcoding (Python) and Player Backend (Go). Designed a "Differ" tool for deep struct comparison in Go.
- Built Vimeo Player test suite (WebdriverIO, Node.js) with on-demand Slack triggers and CI integration via Jenkins Pipeline.
- Presented to 500+ attendees at the 2022 Geekle Conference on WebStream. Wrote a Vimeo Engineering Blog post.
The Orchard
NYC, NY
Software Development Engineer in Test
Sept 2017 – Apr 2019
- Created comprehensive API integration tests in Python as microservice endpoints were rolled out.
- Developed automated UI testing framework using Ruby/Watir/Cucumber.
- Implemented Locust load testing framework; collaborated with developers to tune AWS infrastructure scaling.
Slalom
Boston, MA
QA Analyst
Oct 2016 – Sept 2017
- Developed automated SpecFlow/Protractor/C# tests for a bank client's loan application website.
- Created automated XCTest/Swift tests for a pharmaceutical client's iPad application (700+ users, international). Built Jenkins jobs for build verification, testing and distribution.
REZ-1 (now Blume Global)
Wellesley, MA
QA Engineer II / QA Engineer
Jun 2011 – Oct 2016
- Created enhancements and bug fixes for the public-facing web application using Java, jQuery, MySQL, and CSS. Designed and implemented automated Selenium WebDriver/JUnit tests.
Technical Writer — Rapid7, Boston, MA (Nov 2010 – Apr 2011)
Consultant/Business Analyst — IDC, Framingham, MA (Jan 2010 – Sept 2010)
Technical Writing Intern — Lime Wire LLC, NYC, NY (Summer 2009)
Open Source Contributions
Envoy Gateway (CNCF)
- Support ListenerSet as targetRef for ClientTrafficPolicy. Fix ListenerSet listener Accepted state for InvalidCertificateRef. Separate listener programmed state from HTTPRoute Accepted condition.
cert-manager (CNCF)
- Design and implement custom annotation enabling HTTP-01 solver to use parent Gateway as parentRef for ListenerSets.
Kubernetes Gateway API (CNCF)
- Add ListenerSet to the SectionName interpretation table.
Navidrome
- Bug fix for Jukebox mode on Windows. Set Cache-Control headers on index.html. Add Tak format support.
Independent Work
New Hell Studios
NYC, NY
CEO/President
Dec 2013 – Present
- Designed, developed, and tested Roze Blud and Mausoleum of the Medusa, PC/Mac/Linux games published on Steam.
- Freelance consulting for a software staffing firm: conducted technical screens for QA Automation candidates.
Subcordant
- Creator of Subcordant, a Discord bot that streams music from Subsonic-API compatible servers.
Certification & Education
University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2006–2009
B.A. in English, Cum Laude (GPA 3.57, in-major 3.7) | Certificate in Professional Writing and Technical Communication
B.A. in English, Cum Laude (GPA 3.57, in-major 3.7) | Certificate in Professional Writing and Technical Communication