Alex Ischenko
Public Speaker
Experience
Jun 2024 - Jun 2024
1 monthBerlin, Germany
Public Speaker
WeAreDevelopers
- Participated as a public speaker regarding leadership and transformational topics at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress, attended by 15,000 visitors.
Feb 2024 - Mar 2024
2 monthsBerlin, Germany
Public Speaker
WeAreXena
- Participated as a public speaker during the 700+ person Xena Tech Summit in Berlin, discussing leadership and diversity topics.
Feb 2023 - Present
2 years 6 monthsBerlin, Germany
VP of Engineering
elopage
- Doubled delivery speed by reorganizing functional teams into smaller cross-functional units for 80+ FTEs (around 10 direct reports), including both in-house and remote teams.
- Optimized cloud costs by reducing database expenses by 70%.
- Developed a solid technical and product strategy for the international expansion.
- Full CI/CD integration, reducing automation test runtime from 60 minutes to 15 minutes.
- Stabilized the release process, reducing the number of incidents by 300%.
- As a public speaker at numerous technical events, built a strong company brand, which helped hire more than 30 people within one year from companies like Shopify, Solarisbank, Adjust, and Marley Spoon.
- Scaling technology platforms in a high-growth, scale-up environment (over 70,000 businesses use our platform).
- Establishing a strong culture of transparency, diversity, and regular, honest feedback across the department.
- Identifying and mitigating potential risks associated with technology development, including technical debt, resource constraints, and regulatory compliance issues.
- Creating development handbooks and best practices from scratch across the entire engineering organization.
- Developing robust and scalable system architectures to ensure the company's technology solutions are designed to accommodate growth and adapt to evolving requirements.
- Establishing and monitoring KPIs for the engineering team, measuring progress towards goals and identifying areas for improvement.
- Conducting technical due diligence of external companies for potential acquisitions.
- Promoting continuous learning and providing opportunities for training and mentorship.
Sep 2022 - Sep 2022
1 monthBerlin, Germany
Member
alphalist
Dec 2021 - Feb 2023
1 year 3 monthsBerlin, Germany
Director of Engineering
Unzer
- Shaping the future of Fintech with Pay Later, Payment API, Risks, and more at the hottest payment unicorn of Europe.
- Establishing a strong technical strategy during hypergrowth from 100 to 1000 people within two years.
- Managing cross-functional engineering teams across Austria, Germany, and other countries (more than 100 FTEs, around 10 direct reports).
- Hiring engineers and scaling teams.
- Mentoring engineering leaders and architects.
- Creating a culture of inclusivity, transparency, and openness in diverse engineering teams.
- Distributing teams across Germany, Austria, Denmark, and other countries.
Sep 2021 - Dec 2021
4 monthsBerlin, Germany
Principal Architect
Unzer
- Shaping the future architecture of payments at the hottest payment unicorn of Europe.
- Working on the technical strategy for the enterprise architectural vision of the company, including API integrations and connection of acquired companies into the Unzer One platform.
Jun 2021 - Present
4 years 2 monthsBerlin, Germany
Mentor
Mentoring Club
The Mentoring Club was created during the 2020 pandemic to support people in their personal learning journeys and help connect professionals with those who love to learn.
Worked on a not-for-profit basis as an expert in topics such as building highly motivated teams, developing technical strategy, scaling products, building tech startups, and more.
Leadership & Management
Software Engineering
Scaling teams
Relocating engineers from different countries to Germany
Solutions Architecture
Technical due diligence
Building strong engineering culture
Startups
Mar 2018 - Aug 2021
3 years 6 monthsBerlin, Germany
CTO
Dentolo / Petolo (Zurich Insurance Group)
- Managing engineering teams to build next-generation dental health insurance products from scratch, including frontend, backend, DevOps, QA automation engineers, and freelancers.
- Building an API platform as a SaaS solution for insurance partners such as DA-Direct and Zurich Group.
- Designing software architecture and applying best code practices, including continuous code review.
- Preparing technical due diligence that contributed to the company's acquisition by Zurich Insurance Group.
- Planning budgets for engineering teams and infrastructure.
- Coaching and mentoring team members through one-on-ones and honest feedback.
- Representing the company to investors from the technical side.
- Managing remote and in-house teams using Agile approaches (scrum, kanban).
- Building scalable microservices and affiliate marketing services.
- Applying GDPR compliance to services and infrastructure.
Aug 2016 - Mar 2018
1 year 8 monthsBerlin, Germany
CTO, Co-founder
Skillfolio
- Managing the engineering team to build a job platform from scratch.
- Hiring new team members.
- Setting strategy and goals across engineering teams.
- Creating best practices, continuous code review, and code style guides.
- Representing the company technically at events and pitches.
- Building microservices based on REST API.
- Using Agile methodologies (scrum, kanban) to manage the team.
- Developing a tech-focused company culture.
- Designing the software architecture and core functionality.
Dec 2015 - Jul 2016
8 monthsBerlin, Germany
CTO, Co-founder
Edumagics
- Managing the engineering team to build a service for students across different universities from scratch.
- Hiring new team members.
- Designing the software architecture and core functionality.
- Creating best practices, continuous code review, and code style guides.
- Using Agile methodologies (scrum, kanban) to manage the team.
- Developing a tech-focused company culture.
Feb 2013 - Feb 2018
5 years 1 monthBerlin, Germany
Hands-on CTO
SoftGames
- Responsible for developing the gaming platform's core from scratch, handling more than one million unique users per day.
- Leading projects involving subscriptions and integrations with various APIs.
- Designing the software architecture of the platform.
- Teaching and coaching developers.
- Creating and enforcing best practices for code among development teams.
Sep 2001 - Jan 2013
11 years 5 monthsLead Developer, Engineering Manager
Consulting
- Spearheaded development teams across multiple sectors, including Logistics, FinTech, Healthcare, and Real Estate, ensuring high-quality deliverables for clients in the US and EU.
- Worked as the main technical contact, helping clients understand how their business needs could be turned into technical solutions.
- Managed and mentored cross-functional engineering teams, fostering a collaborative environment and driving continuous improvement in coding standards and development practices.
- Developed and executed technical strategies, aligning project goals with the latest industry trends and best practices to optimize performance and scalability.
- Successfully balanced multiple projects simultaneously, ensuring timely delivery and maintaining high standards across diverse industries.
- Designed and implemented robust, scalable system architectures tailored to specific industry needs, from secure payment gateways in FinTech to compliance-focused healthcare systems.
- Led code reviews and established QA processes, ensuring code quality, security, and adherence to regulatory requirements across all projects.
- Championed Agile and Scrum methodologies, improving team productivity, adaptability, and responsiveness to changing project requirements.
- Evaluated and selected appropriate technology stacks for each project, maximizing efficiency and future-proofing systems.
- Provided clear, regular updates to stakeholders, bridging the gap between technical teams and business leaders to align expectations and deliver value.
Summary
- More than two decades of experience in building and leading development teams with high-quality product delivery
- Strong architectural experience and technical strategy in building scalable platforms. (from zero to 2M daily users within few months, from zero to more than 250M€ ARR)
- Managing an annual engineering and product budget of 15M€ +.
- Strategy focused on small but efficient teams (the best example for me is the Telegram platform, with an R&D team of 30 developers). In the past, I’ve managed teams ranging in size from 5 to 150 FTEs.
- Establishing SLI and SLA targets to achieve 99.99% uptime, ensuring high customer satisfaction.
- Fostering a strong engineering culture while scaling from 5 to 100 and then to 1000 people.
- Integration of the GenAI and AI into the product and internal processes
- Strong experience in Fintech, SaaS, E-commerce, Insurtech, Healthcare, and Gaming domains.
- Focus on the Engineering domain, Web, Cloud, and DevOps.
- Extensive track record in scaling enterprise architecture across diverse industries.
- Software Engineer at heart and inspirational leader.
- Setting strategies and goals across multiple engineering teams.
- Hiring, inspiring, and growing cross-functional engineering teams.
- Effectively managing remote and in-house teams.
- Building apps that handle more than two million unique users per day.
- Participating as a public speaker at engineering events with over 15000 attendees and building the strong company brand, which helps attract the best talent.
- Consulting for startup investors in the U.S. and Europe.
Languages
English
AdvancedGerman
Intermediate Education
Jan 1998 - Dec 2004
Oles Honchar Dnipro National University
Master of Computer Science · Computer Science · Dnipro, Ukraine
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