About

Staff Software Engineer specialising in platform engineering and infrastructure.
Founder with a background spanning software engineering, entrepreneurship, and business operations.

Before becoming a software engineer, I worked across business, operational, and leadership roles. That perspective continues to shape how I approach engineering: focusing on practical outcomes, organisational impact, and scalable technical solutions.

Website: olafmagnus.com
Phone: (354) 772-7895
Email: olafmagnus@olafmagnus.com
Twitter: @OlafMagnus
Linkedin: OlafMagnus

Current Roles & Ownership

Asana - Staff Software Engineer, Platform2019 - Present

asana.com
Scope & Ownership
  • Technical ownership of platform infrastructure supporting 500+ engineers.
  • Define engineering standards for Kubernetes, GitOps, observability, autoscaling, and platform operations across the organisation.
  • Platform spanning 70+ Kubernetes clusters, 600k+ pods, and workloads deployed across 5 continents.
  • Platform serving 2.5M+ weekly active users and hundreds of production databases.
  • Responsible for organisation-wide cloud infrastructure cost, cost attribution, optimisation strategy, and efficiency.
  • Ownership of the observability platform, including vendor management.

Over my tenure at Asana, I have led several of the company's largest platform and infrastructure initiatives as Technical Lead.

Platform Infrastructure
Technical Lead for Asana's migration to homogeneous, multi-tenant Kubernetes infrastructure. Led design and implementation of platform capabilities spanning GitOps, deployments, networking, security, developer tooling, and operational best practices, while coordinating adoption across engineering teams over a multi-year migration through tech talks, workshops and creating platform champions on multiple teams.

Infrastructure Efficiency
Tech Lead for an ad-hoc Infrastructure Efficiency team established to identify and execute the organisation's highest-leverage engineering and infrastructure optimisation opportunities.
Delivered cross-organisational performance and cost optimisation initiatives by developing domain expertise in unfamiliar systems, resulting in multi-million-dollar infrastructure cost reductions while consistently improving platform performance without direct ownership of the underlying systems.

Storage Scalability
Technical Lead for design and implementation of Asana's distributed database sharding framework, including idempotent transaction mechanisms enabling reliable operations across hundreds of databases.

Tímavera - Co-founder, Co-owner & Board Member2017 - Present

timavera.com / timavera.is

Currently involved as a co-owner and board member, with day-to-day operations managed independently.

Time tracking for small and medium sized businesses, focused on simple time and project registration for field-based teams.
Serves 400+ active companies with more than $300k ARR (2026).

Co-founded and developed the company from inception through commercial growth.
Built the product without external investment, spanning full-stack engineering, infrastructure, product development, sales, and customer support.

▶ Software Engineering Experience (click to expand)

Takumi - Full Stack Software Engineer2017 - 2019

takumi.com

Built and maintained core product capabilities for Takumi's influencer marketing platform, spanning mobile applications, web applications, backend services, databases, and infrastructure.

  • Designed and implemented payment infrastructure and integrations with payment providers, CRM systems, and tax platforms to support international operations.
  • Designed and implemented a granular user management and permissions system, enabling role-based access control across the platform.
  • Built an automated image comparison system using AWS Rekognition to validate approved influencer content against published posts.

Novomatic Lottery Solutions - Software Engineer2015 - 2017

novomatic.com

Developed software solutions for lottery platforms, including player account systems, internal tooling, and frontend architecture improvements.

  • Designed and implemented payment systems for player accounts, integrating with external payment providers.
  • Identified architectural limitations in frontend state management and introduced Flux/Redux patterns, improving predictability, debugging, and maintainability.
  • Designed and implemented secure internal tooling for managing and displaying sensitive lottery content.
  • Established modern engineering workflows by migrating from SVN to Git and introducing code review and pull request practices.
  • Prototyped and introduced WebSocket-based communication patterns for future real-time application development.

▶ Early Experience (click to expand)

University Years2013 - 2016

Before graduating with a degree in software engineering, I actively sought opportunities to apply software engineering in real-world environments.
Alongside my studies, I approached businesses directly, identified opportunities for improvement, and delivered software solutions as an independent contractor while also teaching computer science courses at the University of Iceland.

University of Iceland — Assistant lecturer, Computer Science at I and II

Started as a teaching assistant. Following strong student engagement in my support sessions, the University requested that I host my own lectures and assist the professor with his support classes

Hamborgarafabrikkan — Software Developer (Contractor)

Designed and built a financial reconciliation system to simplify employee settlement processes and reduce manual administrative work.

Shake & Pizza — Software Developer (Contractor)

Designed and built a system to manage and show estimated waiting time for orders.
Owned the full solution lifecycle, including hardware integration, software development, deployment, and user training.

Wilsons Pizza — Software Developer (Contractor)

Designed and built operational systems for managing employee workflows, financial reconciliation, reporting, and inventory processes.
Built reporting capabilities to analyse sales data and support operational decision-making.

Pre-Software Engineering Experience2001 - 2013

Prior to becoming a software engineer, I followed a non-traditional path across a wide range of roles.
Including: hotel director, real estate investment and management, marketing, accounting, team supervision, night club security, and various labour roles.

These experiences developed communication skills, business understanding, and the ability to operate under pressure across diverse teams, and ambiguous environments.

▶ Education (click to expand)

University of Iceland2012 - 2017

B.Sc. Software Engineering

Additional studies2006 - 2011

Natural Sciences, Diploma
Sociology, Diploma