I have spent my career building systems, leading engineering teams, and navigating the space between the two. I stay close enough to the work to understand where things break — and that is a deliberate choice.
If a technical leader cannot sit with the team and work through the difficult problem together, then that person is not truly leading the technical effort. They are managing around it. Sooner or later, the product reflects this.
This is not an abstract belief. It is the result of watching — over two decades — what happens when technical leadership disconnects from the work. The decisions get slower. The architecture drifts. The team notices. I moved from individual contributor to senior director and then chose to move back. That was deliberate.
Scroll through 25+ years from Moscow State University to building GenAI systems in Boston. The milestones that shaped the trajectory are marked.
I joined Jobcase in 2015 when it was a small company. Over the next several years, the organization grew from under 100 to over 300 people. My roles evolved with it — from principal engineer to director to senior director, and then deliberately back toward hands-on technical work.
The current role is about getting GenAI into production in ways that actually work. Not demos. Not experiments. Production systems handling real volume across multiple channels.
I created and ran this session for over five years, through the company's growth from under 100 to over 300 people. Three presenters each month. One hour. Speakers came from across the entire company — not just product or engineering.
Every presentation followed the same framework. Click each step to see what it means.
The format was simple on purpose. It forced clarity — if you cannot explain What, Why, and How in twenty minutes, you probably do not understand the problem well enough yet.
Migrated the core job search engine from Elasticsearch 2.x through 6.5 to 7.x. The numbers tell the story.
Looking for a senior technical leadership position where the leader is expected to understand the problem as deeply as the engineers solving it. People leadership with hands on the keyboard, or senior IC with cross-team scope. Either way, close to the work.
