# Horia Dragomir > UI Developer, Hungry and Foolish Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/horia UI Developer, Hungry and Foolish I am passionate about pushing the web forward, I like games and I am a sucker for a good interface. I also like speaking about front end issues at conferences. With over 20 years of experience in building fast, intuitive user interfaces, I have a proven track record in UI engineering, full-stack development, and engineering management. ## Work Experience ### Software Engineer @ Akia Jan 2023 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area I've worked directly under the CTO, crafting reusable, headless UI components to streamline development and enhance scalability. In close collaboration with the team, I deliver complex, impactful features tailored for both our direct clients and their end-users, ensuring high-quality, flexible solutions that align with Akia’s innovative approach to customer engagement. ### Engineering Manager @ Meta Jan 2019 – Jan 2022 | Menlo Park, California Engineering Manager, Messenger Web & Facebook Internal Tools | Meta Transitioned into management to lead the 14-person Messenger Web team, split across two specialized groups: one focused on user-facing product improvements and another on infrastructure, notably building and maintaining Rescript (previously ReasonML), a powerful OCaml-to-JavaScript compiler library. As Engineering Manager, I leveraged my Tech Lead experience to maintain strategic partnerships and spearhead impactful initiatives, including evolving Messenger Web into an End-to-End Encrypted platform and upgrading the Facebook.com chat interface in line with Meta’s extensive web overhaul. A key accomplishment was advocating for a fully remote Rescript team, with members based in Zurich, Shenzhen, NYC, and Menlo Park, facilitating global collaboration and flexibility. Later, I supported Facebook’s internal Tasks and Butterfly teams, guiding the launch of a streamlined approach to task organization and automation while ensuring continuity for existing workflows. ### Senior Front-end Engineer @ Meta Jan 2014 – Jan 2019 | Menlo Park, California Technical Lead & Manager, Messenger Web UI | Meta Led the team behind all Messenger web experiences, including Chat on Facebook.com and the standalone Messenger.com. Key contributor to the initial launch of Messenger.com—the first platform to extend Facebook's infrastructure beyond Facebook.com—where I developed and maintained core components of the web interface. As Technical Lead, I drove efforts to deliver a seamless, fast, and reliable messaging experience to a global audience, collaborating closely with Messaging Infrastructure teams for system reliability and partnering with teams like Workplace to adapt our stack to their unique needs. ### Owner and UI Developer @ hdragomir.com Jan 2005 – Jan 2014 I've been providing UI/UX enhancements and overhauls since before it was cool. I usually team up with experienced designers to make sure we deliver exquisitely simple solutions to the most complex problems. Most of my projects were WordPress-based development, JavaScript Applications, JavaScript/CSS3 driven User Interfaces and User Interaction design. ### Freelance Consultant @ Wooga Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 | Berlin Area, Germany Rapid prototyper and Remote Teams Lead I spent a long time overseeing our rapid prototyping team's efforts in which we attempted to create simple games to see how novel mechanics would actually feel in a game. The learnings from this team were incorporated into multiple live games As Remote Teams Lead, I managed a remote vendor in Scotland, splitting my time between Berlin and Dundee, Scotland - then facilitating collaboration with a San Francisco based cross platform compiler for our games. ### External Frontend Consultant @ Saxo Bank Jan 2012 – Jan 2012 I worked on adding new features to a financial social network, integrating multiple services under the same umbrella. I also tried to change the approach to UI within the bank's ranks and contributed to a site wide UI refresh ### UI Developer @ wooga Jan 2011 – Jan 2012 I developed high traffic social games and game interfaces using the awesome new HTML5 APIs. I also spend a good amount of time sharing learnings from my experience building fast, responsive mobile UIs with the frontend community and advocating for the release of our initial game and many other components as source-available and open source repositories ### UI Developer @ X3 Jan 2010 – Jan 2011 In charge of Frontend Development and working on UX/UI. Helped turn around X3 studios by giving it a new revenue stream via the Visual Freaks stock graphics store and coordinated all things Frontend for one of the top rated Romanian Design agencies ### UI Developer @ Grok Media PTE LTD Jan 2009 – Jan 2010 Building impeccable user experience on top of rock solid, high level backbones. ### Passionate Web Developer @ Interact SRL Jan 2007 – Jan 2009 I have built and fixed websites you might be visiting daily. Strong, clean code and intuitive user interfaces where my special secret weapon. ### UI Developer @ oxylus Jan 2007 – Jan 2007 Optimizing, adding features to and maintaining a flash based website for a serious and prestigious client. ## Education ### BSC in Computer Science Universitatea De Vest din Timisoara ### Highschool Graduate in English, Mathematics and Computer Science William Shakespeare High ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/hdragomir - Portfolio: http://hdragomir.com --- Source: https://flows.cv/horia JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/horia/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-10