Quick take:
- Marko Iskander was formerly the VP of Engineering at GitHub.
- He is also an experienced software architect who spent three years at Adobe.
- At OpenSea, Marko Iskander aims to give builders, creators, and their fans direct access without a middleman setting the rules.
OpenSea has appointed Marko Iskander as the new VP of engineering. He officially started his new role at the NFT marketplace this week. The announcement was made by OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer in a blog post.
Making the jump from Web2 to Web3, Marko Iskander was formerly the VP of engineering at software development platform, GitHub. In his four years at GitHub, Marko Iskander grew his (remote-first) team from 60 people to over 300, helping launch GitHub Actions into a fully fledged automation product, helped build GitHub Packages, and continued to ship new features to GitHub CLI and Desktop in the last two years of his time there.
Before GitHub, Marko Iskander was a software architect at Adobe for three years, was CTO of a B2B marketing company, led a team working on big data projects at a large telecom company, and was Ruby Developer at a mobile security startup.
“But beyond his incredible background, Marko has an immense appetite to build, grow, and problem-solve in the world of web3. From our first meeting, I recognized an innate reflection of OpenSea’s values in Marko: high integrity and transparency, ownership mentality, and a drive for high quality execution,” Finzer wrote.
At OpenSea, Marko Iskander will be “establishing rituals that strengthen” the company’s “engineering org and culture”.
This news comes after OpenSea co-founder Alex Atallah announced earlier this week that he is stepping away from the company.
Commenting on leaving GitHub to join OpenSea, Marko Iskander said: “The notable difference, however, is when I joined GitHub, it was in a very established ecosystem: the doubt of version control and peer code reviews had already been worked out of the industry. That’s not the case just yet for NFTs.”
He said that his objective at OpenSea is to give builders, creators, and their fans direct access, without a middleman or institution setting the rules, and to help scale the company further.
“Over the next few years, OpenSea has the opportunity to help build a brand new, open, digital economy. Our vision is ambitious, and it will take an incredible engineering leader at the helm,” Finzer added.
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