My path here was not straight, and I consider that an advantage, though I did not always see it that way. I grew up in Ukraine, Crimea, trained as a veterinary paramedic, and moved to Israel at 21 with no concrete plan. I got into IT at 30, later than almost everyone I know in this industry, and that late start forced a kind of discipline that still shows in how I approach problems: less tolerance for process theater, more focus on what actually moves things forward.

That drive pushed me toward technical leadership. I realized along the way that building good software is not only about code, it is about architecture, culture, and how a team thinks. That took me through engineering management at Globalbit, then CTO at Walla!, and for the past two years, Head of Software Engineering at Gatewise, part of Allegion, where the platform runs in roughly 4,000 multifamily communities across the US. My focus areas are distributed cloud architecture at scale, edge AI deployments on devices like Raspberry Pi and NVIDIA Jetson, and security for systems that need to run 24/7 without compromise.

The thing I am most focused on right now is not architecture in the classic sense. Since early 2024 I have been restructuring how R&D itself operates, shifting from a conventional multi-role department to a team that works through agentic AI workflows and spec-driven development. We eliminated QA, DevOps, project management, and other traditional SDLC roles, not by cutting costs but by looking honestly at what those functions were doing and replacing the coordination overhead with tooling and process redesign. The team today is 5 to 7 people distributed across Israel, North Macedonia, Canada, and India, fully remote, and it ships faster than larger teams I have run before, which honestly still surprises me when I think about it.

I stay technical because I have seen too many times what happens when engineering leadership loses touch with the actual work. I prototype, I write specs, I validate hypotheses directly when something hard needs a second pair of eyes.

Outside of work I train for triathlons, run long distances, and ride motorcycles.

On this site I write about what I see from inside this transition. The parts that work, the parts that do not, and what I think is coming next.