Marek Jalovec

VP, Engineering - Tooling and Security

FINN

Mar 2026 - Current (7 months)

Chief Technology Officer

Kontext

Jun 2025 - Jan 2026 (8 months)

- Leading the engineering organization in Prague, defining technical direction and ensuring execution while aligning closely with stakeholders in the US and China.
- Scaled the business by several orders of magnitude by:
|- Building and launching new SDKs (Flutter, iOS, Android)
|- Integrating 15 DSPs and several publishers
`- Implementing the Ad Context Protocol (AdCP)—agentic protocol for AI agent-driven advertising
- Raised engineering standards by restructuring the codebase and improving architecture to support scalable, AI-assisted development.
- Achieved orders-of-magnitude performance improvements across core systems.
- Delivered key business enablers, including Open Measurement SDK integra

VP, Engineering - Tooling and Security

FINN

Aug 2022 - Jun 2025 (2 years 11 months)

Leading a multifaceted engineering team responsible for IT, cybersecurity, cloud operations, and technical writing.

- Collaborating with cross-functional teams on aligning engineering efforts with strategic business goals, ensuring technology investments translate into measurable growth and competitive advantage while considering compliance, cybersecurity, data protection, and operational efficiency needs.
- Established a comprehensive cybersecurity program to enhance FINN’s resilience to digital threats, starting from the ground up. This initiative included but was not limited to developing and implementing governance guidelines and cloud usage best practices to make the company's infrastructure more efficient and secure, a

Director, Cloud Ops Engineering

Citrix

Dec 2021 - Jul 2022 (8 months)

Leading SysOps/CloudOps, DB, and Shared Engineering Services teams at Wrike (a Citrix company) while reporting to Wrike CTO.

Responsible for:
- Career development of a multidisciplinary team
- Budgeting & Inventorization of DC & Cloud assets, incl. cost saving activities
- Infrastructure management with a focus on SLA compliance
- Incident response, risk management, compliance (SOC2, ISO 270xx, etc.)
- Physical HW purchases and resource management in our datacenters
- Expanding to new Geo regions (cloud) in alignment with business needs

Director, Engineering + Prague Site Leader

Citrix

Apr 2020 - Dec 2021 (1 year 9 months)

Responsible for Citrix Workspace R&D and Site in Prague (CZ) with 100+ employees and contractors (10 teams across two SAFe ARTs), its overall affairs (HR, TA, Finance, Legal, Facilities), and alignment with off-site engineering teams.

In the first 12 months in the role the team:
- Improved in delivery predictability by more than 50%
- implemented OKRs as a way how to define and measure success
- Fixed CI pipeline performance and reliability
- Significantly reduced bug influx and improved resolution times
- Maintained zero security issues past SLA
- Stayed reasonably compliant with all mandatory training and security education requirements
- Removed significant technical blockers and adopted a De

Sr. Manager, Engineering + Architect

Citrix

Jan 2020 - Apr 2020 (4 months)

- Responsible for Prague Workspace R&D during the transition of senior leadership
- Direct line management of ~40 employees while looking for new managers
- Cooperating with other teams outside of Prague to define the technological vision for the next 12+ months
- Providing oversight and high-level guidance for service-level architects

Manager II, Engineering

Citrix

Jul 2019 - Dec 2019 (6 months)

- Leading three product teams working on further improving Sapho integration to Citrix Cloud and to Citrix Workspace
- Defining architecture and technological roadmap from the position of a Product Owner
- Direct line management of ~25 employees

Manager I, Engineering

Citrix

Nov 2018 - Jun 2019 (8 months)

- Leading Cloud Integration team - core team implementing existing Citrix security protocols and technologies, and integrating previously on-premise product (Sapho) to Citrix Cloud
- Cooperating with lead architects and development teams around the world to define technological roadmap and architectural gaps
- The team managed to make the initial implementation in a record time of less than five months for Citrix Synergy 2019

Team Leader, Senior Front-End Engineer, DevOps

Sapho acquired by Citrix

Sep 2017 - Nov 2018 (1 year 3 months)

G

Founder

Gilbr

Feb 2016 - Apr 2018 (2 years 3 months)

Gilbr was a bootstraped venture that provided customers with a powerful Email Marketing solution built on AWS services (e.g., SES, SNS, SQS, EC2, EB, S3, R53, CF, ...). Among the differentiating features were advanced template previews (desktop and mobile clients) and template debugging insights that highlighted parts of code that could lead to visual and deliverability issues with exotic email clients and servers.

Senior Front-End Engineer, DevOps

Sapho acquired by Citrix

Apr 2015 - Sep 2017 (2 years 6 months)

I've joined the company as a senior developer with a focus on frontend, DevOps, and tooling. As the company grew over the years, I became a team leader in one of the core teams. I had helped team members to share knowledge, facilitate difficult meetings, and to decide complex architectonic decisions. I've interviewed most of the current frontend population and led a few big refactoring initiatives that moved the codebase from jQuery Mobile to React.

Senior Developer

McCann Prague

Aug 2013 - Feb 2015 (1 year 7 months)

Work at McCANN Prague brought many opportunities to participate in developing various applications, microsites, and webpages for clients like MasterCard, Vodafone, and HERO. This often included extensive black-box reverse-engineering of client systems to make complex integrations happen on a tight schedule. When not busy with client projects, I developed tooling for the internal team at McCann Prague — an in-house Dropbox alternative, SMS gateway, a custom mailing system built on Mandrill, a client feedback tool, and many others.

Web & iOS developer

Self Employed

Jul 2013 - Apr 2018 (4 years 10 months)

Contract work led me to many new areas and technologies, from video streaming, data mining and processing, and advanced automation to various mobile, hardware, and IoT projects.

Head of development, Python/PHP/iOS developer

Brandz Friendz sro

Nov 2011 - Jul 2013 (1 year 9 months)

I've been responsible for the entire development effort and project management of a small digital agency (10-15 employees). Technologies included mainly Python for backend, JavaScript with Flash for frontend, and Objective-C for iOS development. The most significant part of our work was Facebook applications (i.e., polls, creative contests, microsites), the rest being custom development for clients mostly from the Czech Republic.

Backend tool developer

LiveSport sro

Dec 2010 - Oct 2011 (11 months)

Work in LiveSport has been very inspirational and allowed me to get a profound understanding of MySQL micro-optimizations to achieve the top-notch performance of XML parsers. Apart from data ingest service, the development was mostly about tools for internal use in PHP and JavaScript — control panel for employees entering real-time data from sports events, general data management tool, and metadata generator with translation to over 20 languages in real-time.

Facebook App and Custom CRM/Warehouse system developer

Fleveo sro

Feb 2010 - Dec 2010 (11 months)

In the beginning, my work at Fleveo was largely about Facebook applications. However, it quickly changed to the development of big CRM and warehouse system for one of the biggest Czech manufacturers of doors (CAG). The system had advanced real-time tracking of parts in the manufacturing process along with an extensive configurator for the sales department and analytics of delays during the manufacturing process.

P

Accounting/Warehouse management system developer

Prudent sro

May 2008 - Feb 2010 (1 year 10 months)

Prudent got me close to developing systems in the fintech area as the main project was an accounting and warehouse management system used by PetCenter stores (pet supplies). The system was used in close to 70 stores across the country with the main server in Prague that handled centralized data processing. The system was handling hundreds of thousands of orders totaling over $40mil per year.

H

Co-founder & CTO

Hostium sro

Mar 2008 - Sep 2010 (2 years 7 months)

Hostium s.r.o. was a private project providing game servers, virtual and dedicated servers, and web & mail hosting for clients ranging from developers to big companies. The entire infrastructure was running on in-house software handling provisioning, backups, and scaling across servers automatically. After about two and a half years, the company was sold and successfully integrated into a rival company that was trying to expand its efforts and get new clients.

Web developer

VIDIADESIGN sro

Mar 2007 - Apr 2008 (1 year 2 months)

Working for Vidia-Design brought work on bigger web applications (i.e., real estate servers), an in-house CMS with advanced security management and plugin system, and an in-house e-commerce solution.

G

System/Network administrator, Web developer

GameParkcz

May 2003 - Jan 2006 (2 years 9 months)

Working for GamePark was a fortunate coincidence after they acquired the game server for a big MMORPG game I was helping with. The work was mostly about system administration, networking, and tool development, partially about community management.

Web developer

Invisible Systems

Jan 2003 - Jun 2005 (2 years 6 months)

Invisible Systems is a small digital agency helping clients and startups to succeed. My job was mainly web application development.

Webmaster

Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic

Mar 2002 - Feb 2005 (3 years)

Created and periodically updated a simple website with an annual report of activity and a list of research papers done by researchers cooperating with the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.

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Marek Jalovec

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