Luka Dimnik_
A hands-on engineering manager, nerd at heart, still tinkering, still shipping.
I lead engineering teams, almost always somewhere in fintech, from invoicing platforms to card payment rails, and I never put the keyboard down. The fun part, for me, has always been the same: taking something tangled, a team going through change, an undocumented legacy system, and turning it into something that works, and holds up.
(square works best)
cat whoami.txt
I lead engineering teams, and the part I actually care about is whether the people on them are doing the best work of their careers, and enjoying it. My philosophy is simple: happy engineers are productive engineers. I've seen what happens when that's true: a team that holds together through a rough pivot instead of scattering, people who tell you, unprompted, that this is the best job they've had. That's the number I actually track, even if it doesn't fit on a dashboard.
I'm a hands-on EM, which mostly means I've refused to become a full-time meeting attendee. I still write code, I run agentic development workflows with Claude Code daily, and I've authored internal Claude skills my team uses for codebase onboarding. I stay close enough to the work to make good technical calls and clear obstacles fast, without getting in the team's way.
What actually keeps me here is simpler than any of the job titles: I like to tinker. I like the moment a tangled system, or a tangled team, finally clicks into something you can reason about. I like deleting a workaround. I learn by building, breaking, and rebuilding, which is also why I run a Kubernetes homelab in my spare time, and pair agentic workflows with real infrastructure to reverse-engineer decade-old codebases nobody's touched in years.
cat how-i-work.md
Ship things that work
I'd rather deliver something solid and real than something perfect and theoretical. Working software, in front of people, beats a beautiful plan every time.
Untangle the mess
I'm drawn to the gnarly, undocumented, tightly-coupled financial systems nobody wants to open: invoicing, ledgers, settlement flows, and to the teams going through a rough patch. Making both legible again is the part I genuinely enjoy.
Stay hands-on
Titles change; the urge to tinker doesn't. I lead best when I'm still close to the code, the infra, and the people doing the work.
ls ~/tinkering
My Kubernetes homelab
What happens when "I'll just self-host one thing" gets out of hand. A fully declarative, GitOps-driven platform built the way a real org would: version-pinned, secret-managed, monitored end to end. It's my playground for staying sharp on Linux, Docker and GitOps, and the clearest window into how I think about infrastructure.
Built a team people didn't want to leave
One team I led topped the internal engagement survey across a ~50-engineer org, the actual metric I was chasing, disguised as an HR number. Getting there had nothing to do with perks: it was 1:1s that weren't status updates, roadmaps people helped write, and shielding the team from noise without hiding the context that mattered.
Made deploys boring
Turned biweekly, hold-your-breath releases into daily, forgettable ones: a CI/CD pipeline the whole team could trust, with isolated dev environments and 14 repos brought along for the ride.
Untangled a decade-old monolith
Carved a clean cost service out of a tightly-coupled Java 8 monolith using strangler-fig and a lot of patience, reverse-engineering business rules nobody had written down.