About
A short account of how I got here, and what I have learned to pay attention to.
A few convictions I have come to hold strongly. Developers are people before they are resources, and organizations that forget this pay for it eventually — usually in retention, sometimes in outright collapse. Architecture should be honest about what it actually does, rather than about what the diagram claims it does; the gap between those two is where most late-stage problems live. Process is a tool, not a religion, and the moment an organization is spending more energy on process than on work, the signal-to-noise ratio has already collapsed. Technical leadership detached from the codebase drifts quickly into politics, regardless of intent. I try to stay close enough to the work that my opinions have ground underneath them.
I have not stayed in any single industry long enough to become a specialist in that industry specifically. I have worked in adtech in Paris and Moscow, chat-commerce in Tokyo, cloud infrastructure in Hannover, geospatial SaaS in Paris, mobile AI commerce in Nice, and cross-border payments in Luxembourg. Each time I entered a new domain knowing very little about it, and each time what I found was the same thing: the surface changes dramatically between industries, but the underlying work — designing teams, establishing delivery rhythm, recognizing when an architecture has begun to lie to the organization that built it — is almost identical everywhere. That observation is the core of nearly everything else I have come to think about this field.
At the moment I am leading a fifty-five-person delivery organization on a confidential cross-border payments program. In parallel, I build open-source tools for the AI era — Approva, Rhodd, and Codencer — each of which came out of a specific friction I hit often enough to stop ignoring. I co-founded an adtech startup for Telegram Mini Apps, Nygma Ads, where I lead the engineering side of the product. I mentor engineers and leaders on h.careers, partly because I believe the transparency problem in career growth is real and partly because helping other people find the map I did not have is something I cannot seem to stop doing. I am finishing a book on that topic. I also play guitar and have a progressive metal project, I read widely, I spend a disproportionate amount of time on things that look unproductive from the outside, and I try not to let any single dimension of the work compress the rest of me.
I still write code most weeks. Engineering leadership without technical context turns into a version of management where people are moved around as if they were interchangeable units, which they are not, and where decisions about architecture get made by people who have not actually read the code in months.
I grow engineers deliberately. For example, at Zeals, five engineers on my team advanced into leadership roles during my time there; one eventually became VP of Technology. The mechanisms I use are standard — competency matrices, development plans, regular 1-on-1s, honest feedback — but none of them work without the thing underneath, which is a credible path and the trust that if someone walks it, they will actually get where they are being told they could go.
I design process to help people move, not to give managers something to point at in status meetings. The distinction is small but decisive. An organization running lean Scrum with real retrospectives and honest planning is a very different animal from an organization running ceremonial Scrum where the ritual is the point.
I tend to be most useful when something has drifted — when the architecture no longer fits the business, when the team structure is creating more friction than it resolves, or when everyone looks busy but nothing of consequence is shipping. Those situations are diagnostic problems first and execution problems second, and you cannot fix them by running faster.
Leading a fifty-five-person delivery organization on a confidential cross-border payments program. Building Approva, Rhodd, and Codencer. Co-founding Nygma Ads. Mentoring on h.careers. Finishing a book on career growth in IT.
Led platform redesign at Echo Analytics in Paris, including a mid-project architectural pivot in response to a budget cut.
Built a B2C mobile app and a B2B cross-platform SDK at YoloPrice in Nice. Started mentoring on h.careers.
Built the software engineering function from scratch at go2cloud in Hannover after the company acquired a French VDI startup.
Led engineering growth at Zeals in Tokyo, from four people to twenty-five across ten countries. US market launch.
Led engineering for a mission-critical banking platform at Sberbank, which generated approximately thirty percent of the department's revenue.
Built the SmartIndex ML analytics platform at OneFactor from zero. First team in the company to ship on Kubernetes.
First product engineering role at Stroyportal — roughly one million monthly active users.
Started freelancing in Volgograd. jQuery, PHP, Django.