How I got here
Since 2004, in two countries, and one long argument with the idea that “this is how we have always done it.”
Head of Service Desk — where the process discipline started
One of Ukraine’s largest consumer-electronics retailers, over a thousand people in the head office alone. I built its ITIL-based service desk from nothing: the product rollout, the SLAs and KPIs, the service catalogue and regulations, the knowledge base, and the operator team. In parallel I ran the Microsoft infrastructure — reorganised Exchange 2000/2003 onto front-end servers, and stood up a Citrix terminal farm so the ERP client would actually work at remote sites on slow links.
This is the first ITIL project of my career, in 2004 — thirteen years before the ISO 27001 work people usually ask me about.
IT project manager — a company’s infrastructure from zero
A trading and manufacturing holding: roughly a thousand employees, more than seventy branches across Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia. I designed and built its IT from scratch and then ran it.
A data centre designed and constructed, with telecom rooms, structured cabling and certification. A Cisco corporate network uniting fifteen Kyiv sites over the company’s own optical links, monitored with Cisco LMS, ACS and MARS. A registered autonomous system with BGP peering into two providers, balanced and redundant. A Meridian 61 exchange for about 800 subscribers and a hundred external numbers across three operators. Active Directory over a distributed site and domain structure. The tender and infrastructure preparation for Oracle E-Business Suite. And the Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft Ukraine, which I prepared and signed.
A project from these years received an award from S&T Ukraine for best project of the year.
IT instructor — and the author of the course
Windows Server 2003/2008 and its surrounding services. I did not read out someone else’s slides: I wrote the programme and the course structure, added the Exchange, Active Directory, ISA Server and network-infrastructure tracks, and built the assessments used both to grade students and to prepare them for certification. Attendance on the Windows track grew several times over.
Computer systems engineering
BSc in Computer Science in 2011, then the five-year Specialist degree with honours in Information Management Systems and Technologies in 2012 — qualification: computer-systems engineer. The formal grounding I still fall back on when an architecture argument gets hand-wavy.
DomArt.Org, Prime Solutions, Information Systems 123
DomArt.Org (2011) — a web studio I co-founded and later handed to my partner: a PHP/ASP team, a documented delivery process, version control and QA, and an e-commerce rebuild for the clothing retailer Sela with 1C and payment integration.
Prime Solutions (2011–2012) — director. A recruitment agency built from a blank page: business plan, CRM, accounting and tax, entity registration in Ukraine and abroad, licensing. The automation let it run on roughly half the headcount of comparable agencies.
Information Systems 123 (2012–2013) — executive director of a 200-person holding with three branches in call-centre outsourcing and contact-centre software. Strategy, org structure, KPIs, and a material reduction in operating cost.
Director of the project office, then CIO
The e-commerce and delivery arm of the group: 600+ employees, two production sites, and a contact centre of more than 250 people that I built and centralised from scratch, IP telephony and CRM included. ERP rolled out and unified across the company and more than eighty franchise legal entities. An e-commerce platform integrated with Portmone and Liqpay, delivery routing automated, and chatbot automation on COREZOID.
MBA, Heriot-Watt University
Taken while working. Its real value was not the finance modules — it was being forced to argue for technology decisions in the language of the people who sign for them.
CIO of the group
Over 2,500 employees, developed distribution, e-commerce and large production sites. I owned the IT strategy for the Ukrainian group and the integration of IT across the group’s countries — Russia, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan. A corporate data warehouse and data lake with OLAP and Power BI, and a BI department built around it. The MyWaterShop.UA e-commerce platform with mobile apps, chatbots and IoT. An IT business-partner institute and project office, security policy and control of the IT environment, AR/VR projects, and migration into Azure.
CTO & COO — engineering at real load
A product IT company: sixty people, web and mobile products for more than six million users in over thirty countries. I ran the full product cycle — product, design, BA, dev, QA, DevOps — and the availability of it, on AWS and Digital Ocean. Project management moved to Scrum: velocity up more than 20% while business-unit cost fell by more than 30%. Two new web products and three mobile apps shipped.
DITA Group
Founded in 2020 and incorporated as a Delaware C corporation on 17 January 2023. Distributed delivery teams across the United States, Poland and Ukraine, organised into web and mobile apps, business systems, and AI & ML.
Moving the family
We left Ukraine in 2022 and rebuilt in the United States — first Minnesota, then California. It cost more than a paragraph can carry. It also clarified what I actually want to spend the rest of my working life building.
Assistant Professor of Cybersecurity, Dunwoody College of Technology
Teaching the EC-Council CCT and CEH tracks, Windows Server and Red Hat Linux administration, AWS and Azure, and UX/UI. I earned my own EC-Council CCT in December 2023, on the principle that you should sit the exam you are teaching.
Data and AI for industries that are not software industries
Data and AI lead at GreenPlace, co-founder and CDAIO at GreenMix Nutrition; IT and cybersecurity lead for Anovaeon through DITA; volunteer digital and AI strategy advisor to the Protez Foundation. Details below.
