Jakub Dzikowski

Lead Node.js / platform engineer at Gala

2022 - present

Node.js • TypeScript • PostgreSQL • gRPC • AWS

Own architecture, core framework, developer tooling, and production reliability for a production Node.js distributed platform. Responsible for system design, data consistency, and enabling other engineering teams to build on the platform.

• Designed and built core Node.js services: gateway with custom gRPC connection pooling, service discovery, REST API, and domain-specific applications
• Owned PostgreSQL performance at scale
• Led security architecture: cryptographic auth design, collaboration with two external audit firms, vulnerability remediation under production pressure
• Owned production operations: incident response, root-cause analysis, and security-sensitive deployment decisions
• Delivered initial architectures and implementations, then enabled other engineers to build on top

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Core platform services: Developed a service serving as a single access point for the blockchain layer, including a custom gRPC connection pool and service discovery mechanism, running in production for 4 years. Designed and implemented a service with a live copy of the data, serving as the source of truth for chain state, which replaced an expensive Kafka and ClickHouse setup. Owned and managed a 340 GB PostgreSQL database, and continuously improved its performance as data volume grew, for example, reducing the read projection upgrade time from 25 minutes to under 300 ms. 

Authorization and security: Designed and implemented on-chain signature-based authorization with RBAC and multisignature support, serving over 215k users. Worked directly with two top-tier security audit companies, resolving reported issues and identifying missed vulnerabilities, including critical findings that required immediate production deployments.

Production reliability: Operated a production Hyperledger Fabric network with nearly 30 million blocks. Owned incident response, root-cause analysis for hard-to-diagnose failures, and security-sensitive design decisions. Typically delivered the initial architecture and implementation, then enabled other engineers to build on top of it.

Leadership and impact: Helped shape GalaChain across technical direction, delivery, and team processes. Guided and unblocked other engineers, managed direct reports, contributed to hiring, and ran 1:1s and performance reviews. The role required balancing execution speed, code quality, and business needs in a fast-moving startup environment.

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When I joined, the team consisted of four members, and we had a basic chaincode implementation along with a local development environment based on virtual machines. I led the effort to improve the stack, introduce testing and CI, mature the chaincode, and build the initial framework and services that carried us to production in October 2022.

In 2023, the focus shifted to maturing the stack and shaping the technical future of GalaChain. Key work included improving resilience, introducing automatic configuration discovery, building a generic REST API, and adding signature-based authorization. By January 2024, we open-sourced the SDK and launched a public testnet prototype, which matured through the end of 2024.

In 2024 and 2025 I focused on operational stability of the production environment, including Chain Browser, the SDK 2.0 work, multisignature support, and production incident response.

Over time, my role evolved from establishing good engineering practices toward setting technical direction, owning cross-cutting architecture decisions, and acting as the go-to reference for Node.js, security, and infrastructure concerns across the organization.

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