Stefan Maric

From an idea to becoming a Unicorn and beyond, I've led the technical vision at masterworks.com, an SEC and FINRA-regulated platform democratizing art investment enabling anyone to buy and trade shares in blue-chip artworks from renowned artists like Warhol, Monet, and Banksy. Working closely with the founder and leadership team, I've architected and guided the development of their entire tech stack, scaling from zero to over 1M+ users, 70K+ investors, $1B+ in Assets Under Management, and $60M+ already returned to investors.

The core investment and trading platform comprises a GraphQL API built on Node.js and several React frontends, integrated with a plethora of third-party services to power customer acquisition, AML & KYC clearance, user analytics, payment processing (Wire, ACH, Credit Card), IRA transfers, content management, split testing, and customer support. Several satellite projects complement the system by handling authentication, user engagement, data enrichment, market research, lead brokering, observability, and reporting. These projects leverage multiple languages (TypeScript, Java, Python, and Go) and a wide range of frameworks, libraries, and tools—including Expo, Next.js, SolidJS, Svelte, Alpine, Plotly, Redash, Superset, Grafana, Apollo, Drizzle, Vitest, Playwright, MSW, Workbox, k6, Valibot, Hono, Helm, and a long etcetera.

I've led the company through significant industry shifts over the years - migrating from JavaScript to TypeScript while spanning 16 major versions of Node.js and switching package managers (from npm to yarn to pnpm); advancing React patterns from createClass() all the way to hooks; transitioning build systems from Gatsby via Webpack to Vite and Astro; modernizing the CI/CD pipeline from Jenkins through CircleCI to Github Actions; scaling up the authentication system from simple email & password forms to a fully-fledged OAuth/OIDC service with Keycloak; and upgrading the infrastructure from Netlify through AWS Cloudfront to Cloudflare Workers.

I've played a pivotal role across all business units—from Marketing and Sales to FinOps and Research—nurturing a robust engineering culture that embraces good practices, efficient development processes, and modern technologies, helping all development teams maintain a high level of quality while delivering features at a fast pace.

I started working as a full-time, remote contractor at clevertech.biz, a software agency based in NYC, to immediately work with payability.com, a FinTech company focused on helping sellers in marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, and UpWork to grow their businesses by increasing their cash flow. As soon as I boarded, I helped Payability pick up an half-baked AngularJS SPA and get it ready for production, teaming up with the head of design to build their Design System and rework their existing Bootstrap-based UI to match their brand. Over the next 2+ years I led all the frontend development - managing up-to 2 developers at a time - of their public and internal applications, their JavaScript widgets injected in third-party sites, their browser extensions to improve their employees workflows, and all their marketing properties, using AngularJS, Metalsmith, LESS, D3.js, Babel, bower, Browserify, and Gulp among other tools.

After completing my internship and going back to college, I worked part-time and remotely for Geekli.st^†, a startup in the Bay Area that set itself the mission to give developers visibility by creating the ultimate social network for "geeks". I incrementally migrated their frontend from Pug templates + jQuery to AngularJS while maintaining existing features, adding new ones, and building experimental products like an Hackathon management app used for the Slashathon and the #hack4good series, using Bootstrap, Jasmine, Karma, SASS, Yeoman, Bower, Grunt, and all the other cool tools at the time.

To complete my Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Engineering, I did my internship at Dana Venezuela (subsidiary of Dana Holding Corporation) as "Software Engineer assistant" after failing to convince my University to let me do a remote internship at Geekli.st^†. I applied bugfixes and small improvements to their legacy intranet applications running on top of ASP + VBScript, crafted and updated complex queries against Oracle and MS SQL Server databases for finance analytics, and connected those services to a BAAN ERP system. I also did a Software Configuration Management audit and cost analysis to the IT department, where I laid down a detailed plan to move the entire team from a timestamped folders workflow to Git. I got enough time to setup a central git repository using GitLab and train 6 developers on the matter.

Thanks to a friend, I got the opportunity to prove myself to Geekli.st^†, a startup in the Bay Area that set itself the mission to give developers visibility by creating the ultimate social network for "geeks": in order to join them, I was challenged to complete a real task from their backlog during the weekend. I was new to web development, their stack included Node.js v0.4.4, Express, Pug, Redis, MongoDB, Stylus, Nib, and jQuery, and I was going in a family trip to the woods; so I printed out a bunch of guides and API docs to learn offline. As you guessed, I succeeded and got a remote, part-time job where I helped them build the UI, improve the UX, and craft system email templates.

During my first year in college, I worked part-time at soptelecom.com, a small Venezuelan technology consultancy company. I helped several clients, mainly in the manufacturing industry, to manage hardware resources and setup & maintain a wide range of services, from DHCP servers to ticket systems like otrs.com, on top of Windows, Linux, AIX, and Solaris. I also "fixed" hundreds of misconfigured printers and offered tech support to our clients' employees.

Part of my Advanced Studies in Electronics high school program, I joined Dana Venezuela (subsidiary of Dana Holding Corporation) as "Instrumentation Engineer assistant". There I had the opportunity to inspect production lines, do maintenance work, and tweak the code of Allen Bradley and Siemens PLC devices using ladder logic. When I wasn't in the plant, I was in the data-center re-purposing old servers to deploy a centralized repository of disk images to replace the manual process of re-installing & re-configuring Windows XP on the 300+ workstations used by employees across the company with a bit-by-bit formatting over the network using Clonezilla.