CTO / Head of Engineering
I'm a hands-on CTO with 15+ years in B2B SaaS. Coding since 2007, engineering leader since 2015, CTO twice since 2019. Build distributed teams across Eastern Europe, Germany and the US.
At Vidalytics (bootstrapped, profitable video marketing SaaS): tripled engineering from 4 to 12 devs without losing velocity and structured cross-functional teams of
~20 people across devs, QA, PM and DevOps.
Before that, at XOVI in Cologne (11 years, engineer to CTO): hired the first remote engineer in 2015 and grew the Ukraine team from there; promoted to CTO by the new PE ownership in 2019 to drive the post-acquisition changes.
Fluent in 4 languages: English, German, Ukrainian, Russian.
🇺🇦 Born in Ukraine. 🇩🇪 Raised in Germany from age 12.
🇺🇸 Texas high school graduate.
Outcomes over outputs... shipping over talking about it.
scaled engineering
cross-func. teams
release to prod
years in SaaS
Highlights
Hired 14 devs, made 6 performance-based exits. 11 of 12 final devs were my hires. Coached ICs into Team Leads. Sourced the lead QA engineer. Designed team structure across devs, QA, PM, and DevOps. Velocity held throughout.
Hired devs in Ukrainian, reported to German leadership in German. Ran DE/UA delivery years before remote-first was anyone's playbook.
Feature flags. Trunk-based development. Every PR auto-deployed to its own env for review. The plumbing that turns scary releases into Tuesday's lunch.
Power Claude Code user since Feb 2025. Agentic workflows daily to prototype, validate and ship production features end-to-end.
Track record
04/2022 – 12/2025
~4 yrs
RemoteCTO / Head of Engineering
Tripled engineering from 4 to 12 devs without losing velocity through a period of high growth. Hired the 1st lead QA engineer. Structured cross-functional teams across the broader org (~20 people: devs, QA, PM, DevOps). Grew ICs into Team Leads. Built a remote-first culture with continuous delivery: 100s of releases per year, feature flags, per-PR environments.
05/2011 – 04/2022
11 yrs
On-site → HybridWent through XOVI's 2017 PE acquisition and was promoted to CTO by the new ownership in 2019. Scaled the team to 12 engineers across Germany and Ukraine through the integration. Kept delivery on track even when priorities shifted week to week, with a focus on reliability and maintainability.
Spin-off project
Internal spin-off: shipped XOVI's SEO expertise as a Plesk extension, putting it in front of Plesk's hosting userbase. Ran in parallel with the Team Lead and CTO roles, no title change at XOVI.
Promoted to Team Lead in 2015. Set up the Ukraine engineering hub from scratch, sourcing and hiring devs in Ukrainian while reporting to German leadership in German. Delivered high-load databases and microservices.
Joined as engineer #2. Built and shipped features across the product. Helped lay the technical foundation that the SaaS grew on.
07/2007 – 05/2011
~4 yrs
Self-employedFull-Stack Developer & Product Builder
Architected a CMS from scratch (PHP/MySQL) while delivering high-impact technical solutions for a diverse portfolio of freelance clients.
Skills