Performance
How to measure what users actually experience, prevent regressions, and give product teams the tools to own performance themselves.
Engineering leader · SF Bay Area
I lead engineering teams working on performance, platforms, and developer productivity.
I’m Ilia Fainshtroy. I’ve spent more than 20 years building software and 16 years managing engineers. Most recently, I led a multi-team Confluence Cloud engineering organization at Atlassian.
20+years building software
16+years leading teams
Startupbuilder and engineering manager
AtlassianHead of Engineering
My perspective
I’ve worked in startups and at enterprise scale.
In startups, I worked close to the code and learned to make decisions with limited information and resources. At Atlassian, the problems involved larger systems, more teams, and coordination across engineering, product, SRE, and finance.
The scale was different, but much of the job was the same: understand the problem, decide what matters most, make ownership clear, and help the team deliver.
Areas of focus
What I’ve spent most of my time working on.
Developer productivity & CI/CD
How to make builds and tests reliable, find the causes of recurring failures, and establish clear ownership for the pipeline.
Technical strategy
How to turn a broad goal into specific priorities, tradeoffs, and a sequence of work that teams can execute.
Engineering organizations
How to structure teams, develop managers and technical leaders, and keep ownership clear as the scope changes.
Selected impact
Selected results from Atlassian.
Examples from my work on Confluence Cloud performance, cost, developer productivity, and engineering leadership.
Faster Confluence Cloud
Led Confluence performance work across React modernization, streaming, measurement, regression detection, and tools for product teams.
Annual hosting savings
Led the Confluence cost program with Engineering, SRE, and Finance while usage continued to grow.
Engineers at peak scope
Led an organization of managers, principal engineers, and engineers working across performance, platform, developer productivity, APIs, and ecosystem.
AI adoption in one quarter
Increased engineering AI adoption from 7% to 25% through manager coaching and peer sessions based on actual development work.
2018—2026
Atlassian
Head of Engineering · Confluence Cloud
Joined as an engineering manager and later led a 47-person organization through managers and principal engineers. My scope included performance, frontend platform, developer productivity, CI/CD, APIs, ecosystem, and cost reduction.
2016—2018
Tact.ai
Software Engineering Manager
Joined as a senior backend engineer and moved into engineering management, while continuing to work on the architecture of core backend components.
2006—2016
Conduit · ClientConnect · Perion
Engineer → Engineering Manager → Group Manager
Moved from software engineer to engineering manager and group manager. Later took technical ownership of Growmobile's mobile user-acquisition platform and led the team building it.
2004—2006
e-net
Co-founder & CTO
Co-founded the company and served as its CTO.
Writing
Things I plan to write about.
I plan to write about performance, CI/CD, developer productivity, and engineering leadership.
What I learned from improving performance across a large product.
Recovering a CI/CD system that developers could no longer trust.
Turning a broad company goal into a plan that teams can execute.
Essays coming soon.
Contact
Want to get in touch?
You can reach me by email or connect with me on LinkedIn.