Alex Ischenko

Public Speaker

Berlin, Germany

Experience

Jun 2024 - Jun 2024
1 month
Berlin, 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 months
Berlin, 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 months
Berlin, 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 month
Berlin, Germany

Member

alphalist

Dec 2021 - Feb 2023
1 year 3 months
Berlin, 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 months
Berlin, 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 months
Berlin, 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 months
Berlin, 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 months
Berlin, 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 months
Berlin, 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 month
Berlin, 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 months

Lead 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
Advanced
German
Intermediate

Education

Jan 1998 - Dec 2004

Oles Honchar Dnipro National University

Master of Computer Science · Computer Science · Dnipro, Ukraine