Grzegorz Pawlik
Verified Expert in Engineering
Full-stack Software Engineer and Developer
Sopot, Poland
Toptal member since January 26, 2021
Grzegorz is a highly skilled full-stack software engineer with 17 years of experience in leading teams, technical screening, and creating a high-trust culture. They consistently deliver high-quality results on time and within budget, specializing in complex apps with extensive business logic. Grzegorz oversaw the MVP chat feature at Toptal and led Stripe API integrations and employee benefits automation in the OysterHR startup. Previously they worked with eSky and Nexway.
Portfolio
Experience
- Web Development - 13 years
- JavaScript - 13 years
- Code Review - 13 years
- Agile Deployment - 13 years
- Ruby - 10 years
- PostgreSQL - 7 years
- Ruby on Rails (RoR) - 6 years
- RSpec - 6 years
Preferred Environment
Code Review, RSpec, Git, Ruby, Linux
The most amazing...
...project I've led was the chat app used by Toptal clients and talent. I'm very proud of the team I led and the approach I took to deliver the solution on time.
Work Experience
Senior Developer
FilialHealth
- Extracted reusable view components, migrated layout logic from JavaScript to CSS container queries, and reframed utility-class helpers into a higher-level design-system API. Picked up across the codebase by every front-end contributor.
- Improved and maintained the development seed data — kept it realistic and current as the domain evolved, so every engineer's local environment mirrors production scenarios. Foundational for onboarding, manual QA, and screenshot-driven UI work.
- Introduced a foundational medical-codes domain model integrated with the scheduling system, with type-aware defaults. The model remains central to product flows shipped years later.
- Reshaped account-scoped routing across the app — renamed the public identifier, simplified validation, migrated profile URLs to tenant-scoped paths, and fixed post-authentication redirect logic that fell out of the change.
- Introduced contextual error reporting — capturing per-request state on exceptions — early in the application's life. The foundation of later observability work builds on.
- Enabled branch coverage, stabilized flaky tests, made retry behavior deterministic, and consistently shipped coverage improvements alongside feature work. Lifted CI reliability for the whole team.
- Led a reliability initiative on a healthcare SaaS platform: distributed tracing on third-party clients, structured error context, retry semantics for transient failures, and standardized HTTP timeouts. Reduced MTTR and silent failures.
- Replaced legacy HTTP Basic Auth on internal admin surfaces with a centralized superadmin authorization gate. Rebuilt the user-permissions admin UI and removed leakage of internal enum mappings from the service layer.
- Drove a multi-step deprecation of a legacy column underpinning a core domain model. Staged across sequential PRs with backfills and read-path migrations, designed for safe rollback at every step.
- Designed and shipped a multi-PR redesign of the clinical documentation editor — new/edit flows, save-state UX, dirty-form protection, browser navigation guards, URL state. Owned end-to-end from spec through rollout.
Senior/Staff Engineer
Oyster
- Implemented payment system integration (Stripe) ACH/SEPA/BACS.
- Tracked and fixed bugs using the Sentry exception reporting tool.
- Architected and developed an employee benefits automation system.
- Managed tools like Sentry, Heroku, and GitHub Actions.
- Contributed to detecting and fixing security vulnerabilities.
- Improved CI and CD pipelines and fixed flaky tests.
Team Lead and Engineering Manager
Toptal
- Led a successful implementation and delivery of a dedicated chat solution, actively worked with stakeholders to manage features, and delivered on time.
- Onboarded and integrated new team members into the team.
- Oversaw an established team through a successful domain switch; the team delivered value in the first six months.
Senior Software Engineer
Toptal
- Reduced the time to introduce a new vertical by a factor of 12.
- Improved internal spec performance by a factor of 5 (includes reviewing and coaching other teams on the best practices).
- Introduced a fast-performing, hybrid (static files and DB entries) translation solution.
- Mentored new team members joining the team, helping them in their first month.
- Introduced improvements to the dev's internal toolbox.
Team Leader, Scrum Master, and Developer
Nexway
- Stabilized the team output from chaotic (approximately 10% of the features were rejected by the QA) to very stable (99.48 features accepted in the QA stage).
- Introduced QA processes into the team (peer reviews, peer testing, hostile peer testing).
- Led and coached the team on the testing, which increased the code stability and developer's confidence in the codebase.
Developer and Team Lead
NetArch Interactive Agency
- Introduced source code version control, allowing the company to get to the next level.
- Delivered multiple dedicated web system solutions successfully.
- Designed multiple systems, including architecture and database structure.
Experience
Embedded Chat App
https://portal.toptal.com/I led the team responsible for the 1st MVP version, which was delivered and deployed within three months. It was initially enabled for selected clients and then handed over to another team that enabled it 100%.
Employee Benefits System
https://oysterhr.com/total-rewardsDirect Debit (Stripe) Integration
https://oysterhr.com/Education
Master's Degree in Project Management
Wyższa Szkoła Zarządzania i Biznesu - Kraków, Poland
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science
Uniwersytet Opolski - Opole, Poland
Certifications
Magento Certified Developer
Magento
Skills
Libraries/APIs
REST APIs, React, Node.js, Slack API, Twilio API, jQuery, Stripe API
Tools
Git, RSpec, Cucumber, Claude Code, Apache, GitHub, Sentry, Hotwire, Claude, Zapier, Google Sheets
Languages
Ruby, JavaScript, PHP, Assembler, C++, TypeScript
Frameworks
Ruby on Rails (RoR), CakePHP, Capybara, Ruby on Rails 6, Stimulus, Tailwind CSS
Paradigms
Scrum, Testing, Unit Testing, Management, Test-driven Development (TDD), Synthetic Data Generation
Platforms
Linux, Magento, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Magento 1, Heroku
Storage
MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, EventStore, Datadog
Industry Expertise
Banking & Finance, Accounting
Other
Web Development, Code Review, Integration Testing, Agile Deployment, Full-stack, API Integration, Email Automation, APIs, Full-stack Development, Algorithms, Static Analysis, Profiling, Memory Profiling, Technical Hiring, Ajax, PDF, OAuth, Workflow Automation & System Integration, User Interface (UI), Email, State Machines, Turing Machines, Computer Graphics, Law, Economics, WebSockets, Performance Testing, DocuSign, Events, ViewComponent, Faraday, Multi-tenant SaaS, Incident Response, Authorization, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Large Language Models (LLMs), AI Automation, OpenAI
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