Previous experience | Danijel Grabež

SAP Signavio, helping enterprises transform and optimize their core processes with data-driven insight.

I joined SAP Signavio as a Development Expert to help build product features that enable enterprises to understand, govern, and continuously improve their processes.

My recent focus has been on leading the access management initiative to establish a robust, scalable permissions model across our platform, and driving AI adoption on my team; identifying where AI can meaningfully streamline our workflows and bringing the team along through hands-on experimentation, knowledge sharing, and practical tooling. On top of that, I’ve been building the analytics layer and developing collaborative features like a rich text editor and attachment support for commenting, I also push for stronger team practices around documentation, technical discussions, and how we work together.

Technologies we use: TypeScript, Java/Kotlin, AWS, GraphQL, Docker, Web Components, Storybook, Jest, Cypress.

Sesame, building America’s superstore for affordable top doctors and specialists.

I joined the product team at Sesame as a Senior Software Engineer, where I helped build a unique marketplace that makes high-quality health care more accessible and affordable. Over time, I grew into leading the mobile team, guiding the design and development of Sesame’s mobile platform.

Throughout my time at Sesame, I led strategic projects, optimized performance across the stack, and drove initiatives that significantly shaped our product and business trajectory, while also mentoring and growing the team. Along the way, I tackled challenges that ranged from technical infrastructure to high-impact partnerships, setting the stage for the next chapter of innovation at Sesame.

Used technologies: NextJS, React Native, Microservices, GCP, GraphQL, TypeScript, Styled Components, Storybook, Jest, Playwright.

Data-driven features

We measured features with clear metrics and A/B tests, and analyzed the results to drive optimizations that improved conversion.

Refactoring analytics infrastructure

One of my first challenges at Sesame was enhancing our analytics layer, built on Mixpanel and Segment. I focused on ensuring accurate tracking of users across sessions, from non-authenticated to authenticated; so we could capture a complete view of their journey and extract actionable insights into user behavior.

This required close collaboration with backend engineers to align tracking logic and data definitions, ensuring a consistent analytics stack and a unified view of the user journey.

Growing the team

Led interviews for senior engineering candidates, mentored engineers across career development paths, and provided architectural guidance. These efforts improved our technical standards and encouraged a culture of excellence, responsibility, and teamwork.

GraphQL and micro-service infrastructure

I collaborated closely with backend engineers to design and implement efficient GraphQL resolvers, enabling smooth communication across 50+ microservices. This work improved data consistency, performance, and scalability, allowing frontend teams to build features without worrying about backend complexity.

Monitoring and observability

We tracked errors diligently and resolved issues before they caused bottlenecks, using user pain scores to prioritize fixes and improve the experience. This proved an effective way to stay accountable for our work.

In 2023, we focused on scaling our B2B2C partnerships and driving high-volume user onboarding. I led the launch of Sesame @ Work, a program that gave employees and customers of major partners access to Sesame’s services, proving that B2B2C acquisition could scale without compromising reliability or compliance.

I led the initiative end-to-end, from researching and defining the onboarding strategy to coordinating work and driving implementation. By designing flows that enabled users to onboard before full authentication or eligibility checks, we captured 75% of the 2023 funnel, laying the groundwork for the provisional membership model later adopted by Costco and other large partners.

I had the pleasure of working with Danijel for more than a year. He was an amazing teammate who cared deeply about the team and the product we were building. He consistently suggested improvements to our processes, went above and beyond to onboard and mentor new team members, and always strived to do his best.
After joining the mobile team, he quickly became the tech lead, taking ownership and mentorship responsibilities, assisting with project planning, and tackling the most challenging parts of the mobile app.
Yulia Buell
Director of Engineering

More testimonials can be found on my LinkedIn profile

Continuous experimentation

Together with my peers, we continuously improved our technology stack and development processes by collaborating in specialized guilds dedicated to architecture, tooling, and testing strategies, emphasizing performance optimization and scalable solutions.

Design system, Chromatic/Storybook, and accessibility (a11y)

We built a modular design system to ensure consistency across web and mobile apps, using Storybook and Chromatic for documentation and visual regression testing. In parallel, we achieved WCAG AA compliance, improving usability for a broader audience and meeting the strict requirements of our enterprise partners.

How I helped save $50K in under two weeks!

Our consumer-facing marketing website relied on Contentful as a headless CMS. Over the years, we had accumulated a mix of structured and unstructured data; some planned, some not so much ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. As a result, we ended up on Contentful’s highest pricing tier, costing us over $50K per year.

With just two weeks before the contract renewal, we took on the challenge of reworking our CMS setup. By streamlining the infrastructure, consolidating content models, and preparing a clean, scalable foundation, we successfully reduced costs and set the platform up for sustainable growth.

Image of Slack message where I shared cost savings and performance optimizations

BONUS: significant performance optimizations ✨

Leading a mobile team — I led a cross-functional team to build a mobile app as part of a retention initiative supporting our weight loss and other subscription models. Guided the project from idea to launch, making sure the app was intuitive, engaging, and helped members stay on track with their health goals.

Kiron, moving to Germany and helping to build a social learning platform for underserved communities.

I moved from Novi Sad to Berlin to join the product team at Kiron. As a Software Developer, my focus was mainly on product foundations and API development. To help shape the product accordingly, I have participated in conducting experiments with online campaigns and user testings. In addition to product-focused goals, I helped expanding our development team by interviewing and onboarding new team members. My latest efforts involved building a white-label platform for our corporate clients and backend migration from Laravel to NodeJS.

Used technologies: Docker, Node, Laravel, PosgtreSQL, GraphQL, React, Flow, Emotion, Storybook, Jest, Cypress.

Rapid Development

Although a reasonably small team, we manage to perform high without affecting a healthy work-life balance. Well-defined processes across the organization, with optimized tooling, have certainly contributed to that challenge!

UI Architecture

When I joined Kiron, one of my main challenges was to make our codebase up-to-date with latest trends. This effort involved improving tooling, migrating the existing codebase to Emotion with more scalable UI architecture, and collaborating with the design team to develop our internal design system.

I was also responsible for improving testing strategies. For this matter, we replaced our Enzyme configuration with React Testing Library and configured Cypress to work with our local database setup by replicating the base environment on every run.

Scaling Our Reach

Our major milestone for 2020 was to navigate our organization towards for-profit ventures. We noticed the world needs a social learning platform that would support online learners during the challenges imposed by the pandemic that is safe, secure, and well established.

During 2020 and 2021, we acquired several partners across the EU and enabled access to necessary learning materials to thousands of students.

Internationalization

We spent a fair amount of time providing multi-language support to our students. We made a particular effort to make our content properly presented for the RTL usage since a certain number of our users come from Arab countries.

Authentication

In early 2020, we decided to improve our authentication flows to enable our users easier access to the application with proper support when they lose their credentials.

Artificial Intelligence Courses

Search

We use Algolia to provide our users with fast and reliable results while exploring our platform. We decided to only expose a small part of our DB for security reasons, which proved to be a peculiar challenge for data syncing since we publish numerous courses daily.

3rd Party Integrations

We introduced various integrations to our platform: from enabling SSO connection for our partner universities, providing the creation of interactive learning materials via h5p, to improving student communication via Mattermost to name a few.

GraphQL and Business Layer

As one of the most exciting parts of my day-to-day responsibilities, I have the opportunity to work and improve our internal data modeling tool from which we can generate a back-office interface for our admin users. Also, this tool produces TypeScript types and optimized data loaders for more performant access to our database via GraphQL. To keep the business layer aligned to our future challenges, we heavily invested our efforts in finding ways to migrate our infrastructure from Laravel to Node.

Blueberry, remote adventures and exquisite Czech cuisine.

I served as a JavaScript Developer for Blueberry (acq. by BOOT!Q in 2019.), helping build many exciting internal and external products. Having the opportunity to work remotely, I managed to continually improve myself in challenges remote work entails, while occasionally visiting Prague’s office, for meeting new clients and tightening collaboration with Czech colleagues.

I was involved in defining project architecture and making decisions on the way the projects should evolve. I primarily worked on React, and React Native based projects. To evaluate the effectiveness of our software teams, and the craft of software development, we honed the points outlined in the Joel test and used bi-weekly agile sprints. We also experimented with various “fresh” technologies at that time, such as face-recognition and ReasonML.

Echo — In cooperation with the Czech Ministry of Internal Affairs, we developed a mobile application to involve the general public in the search for missing children.

Used technologies: React Native, GraphQL, AWS Serverless and Styled Components.

Panoram — React Native application which provides users to divide their panoramic picture into 2, 3, 4 or 5 parts into three easy steps. Created images are compatible with most social app stories, like Instagram, Snapchat, or Facebook.

Image of Scrum Space project presentation

Scrum Space — We built Scrum space intending to make the scrum ceremonies easier and fun to use.

As one of the internal projects we worked on, we decided to go with ReasonML, streams and we also experimented with the registration-free approach.

Travel Companion — Upcoming travel itinerary at your fingertips built for Riviera Tour. Inform about sightseeings and upcoming activities with the app.

Used technologies: React Native, Redux, Redux-Saga, Mapbox and Styled Components.

Image of Riviera Tour project presentation

Superawesome, first job, first hands-on experience with international clients and pushing personal boundaries.

When I joined Superawesome, I was ¼ of the company, which for a design agency means, a plethora of responsibilities. I find myself lucky enough to have been exposed to so many different challenges from the early beginning and for being trusted on delivering my best work at that time. This helped me grow beyond my imagination and it helped me mold further steps in the development of my career. Being one of the best agencies in Serbia, I had an opportunity to work on a wide variety of interesting projects from respected brands across the world.

I served as a Product Designer and Front-end Developer, and I lead direct communication with the stakeholders of various size making sure projects evolve in the right direction.

HLT Corp — Design and development for corporate website and more than 30 landing pages for the makers of the top-rated study applications.

We’ve collaborated with their in-house team who helped us carry through ideations to final results.

SK Gaming — Reorganizing, rebranding and developing a website for a leading eSports organization. More than 20 years of diverse content was reimagined — news, videos, matches, rankings, team and user profiles and social aspects.

Fun fact

Back in 2015, this was the most challenging project I’ve worked on, since I was responsible for most of the project pipeline. At that time, to automatise and simplify the development workflow, I was leveraging the power of the Pug templating language and Grunt task runner.

Years of content

Consistency and attention to details

As one of the most respected eSport clubs in the world, with several million daily impressions, a particular effort was involved in providing consistency and forming the proper brand presence on the web.

Personal work, open-source projects, and long-term collaboration

I enjoy exploring different technologies by creating internal solutions for the projects I work on. I prefer honing long-term relationships on projects for any area of digital business.

When possible, I am contributing to open source community.

Personal project

Hey, Polls! — Create and share polls effortlessly. Making a choice has never been so easy before. Development stack involves: React, Redux, Firebase, Cypress, Jest, Emotion and Docz styleguide.

Check out the web, Android application, or interesting details and thoughts on my blog.

Personal project (paused)

HeyLikey — A web application that integrates a seamless feedback widget into any blog or website. Think of it as a decentralized like button that empowers users to express appreciation for content.

The backend, authentication flow and widget are fully developed and tested, with all initial user flows designed with plans to resume development in the future™ 🤞.

Open Source projects:

Transliterate — VS Code extension which converts latin text to cyrillic and vice versa. Убрзај мапирање

Responsively — Easily adjust JSX components with a responsive, mobile-first approach in mind. Style the way

Lifeboat and Lifeboat Jade — Used on numerous front-end projects with built-in code guide and site pages provided. Keep afloat

Other projects — I created several npm packages and demos using React Native with the primary focus on animation. Most of the work can be found on my GitHub profile. If you’d like to explore my early work in design and development, feel free to visit my Behance profile to see where it all began.

Iten Engineering — I’ve been working with Iten Engineering for more than 10 years now. Our collaboration has spanned across many areas of their products and marketing efforts. From their corporate website and blog, through branding for digital and print media, to their ventures, including remote desktop access solution and social platform for helping farmers enter the international market.