---
slug: experience
title: Experience
---

## Operating Profile

Co-founder and operator with a technical and sales background. I can own cloud infrastructure and security, sell directly to customers, shape product direction, hire and fire, handle accounting and legal paperwork, supervise open-source work, and keep moving when the first version is ugly. I am not afraid of boring administration, pivots, or spending time on a direction that later proves wrong.

My bias is simple:  an 80% done ugly solution in 7 days beats a 100% perfect solution in 3 months. The world does not pause while a team waits for the perfect launch window. Ship, learn, protect the downside, and improve.

## Selected Hard Signals

- Automated impulse-buy operations from 30-50 manual transactions per day to 1000+ automated transactions per day with one salesperson needed.
- Reduced accounting work by 98% by connecting payment, social, website, and accounting systems through automation.
- Delivered ECS migration work with 99.99% uptime, 90% lower container maintenance, a 70% faster release cycle, and 30% lower operational expense from shared ALB design.
- Reused 90% of existing IaC and CI/CD codebases for white-label infrastructure delivery, reducing delivery time and production drift risk.

## Current Roles

- Aug 2023 - present: AWS Engineer | AI Harness Engineer at Firi AS (Project McFly)
   - Skills: Amazon ECS · AWS Security · GitHub Actions · Amazon Web Services (AWS) · Terraform · Cloudflare · PostgreSQL/RDS/Aurora · Proxmox · Grafana/Prometheus
   - Own AWS infrastructure and security work across ECS, RDS/Aurora, ElastiCache, MSK, Cloudflare, CI/CD, observability, stale resource cleanup, and production database operations.
   - Build AI harnesses around real operational data: Text-to-SQL, RAG over private schema knowledge, agent guardrails, workflow state tracking, SQL error handling, unknown-question routing, and human review points.
   - Use AI as an engineering multiplier for Terraform migrations, RDS TLS debugging, Redis migration support, repository security checks, documentation, and controlled automation.
   - Keep infrastructure agents safe with read-only credentials, blocked destructive commands, denied Terraform apply paths, staged plans, review checkpoints, and separation between AI-generated work and human-approved production changes.
   - Continue the broader Project McFly work: service-level security groups, Cloudflare WAF and Zero Trust, load balancing, tunnel and SSH access patterns, secondary-region readiness, ECS image inventory, and Grafana/Prometheus alerting.

- 2020 - present: Co-founder | Principal Consultant | Business Operator at FivexL
   - Skills: Business Development · Hiring · Team Management · Accounting · Legal Operations · Open Source · AWS Consulting · Terraform · DevSecOps
   - Run the unglamorous company work: business development, contracts, accounting, legal coordination, hiring and firing, client communication, delivery risk, and operational paperwork.
   - Supervise consulting and open-source direction, keeping reusable infrastructure modules, security practices, and client delivery aligned with what the business can actually support.
   - Balance technical delivery with business constraints: cash flow, client trust, delivery speed, reputation, and the cost of spending too long on a perfect solution.

- Current: Co-founder | Product and Founder Sales at Sirob Tech
   - Skills: Founder Sales · Direct Sales · Product Promotion · Business Development · Product Vision · UX · Integrations · Feature Prioritization · Customer Discovery
   - Drive business development, product promotion, and direct sales, including founder-led conversations, product positioning, objections, demos, and practical follow-up.
   - Shape product vision, UX, feature selection, integrations, and pivots based on real buyer feedback instead of abstract roadmap planning.
   - Work across the uncomfortable middle of a startup: selling before the product is perfect, cutting scope, changing direction, and keeping momentum while learning from the market.

- Current: AI Experiments | Private Notetaker | ZoJump and Personal Projects
   - Skills: LLM Agents · RAG · Text-to-SQL · LangChain · LangGraph · LlamaIndex · Vanna AI · PostgreSQL/PGVector · SQLAlchemy · Slack Apps · GitHub Apps · Cloudflare Workers
   - Build local-first AI experiments, including the Personal Private Notetaker concept for capturing commitments, extracting follow-up work, and delegating tasks to other agents while keeping sensitive notes under personal control.
   - Build and test assistant layers such as Boris AI, using workspace knowledge, application context, Slack/GitHub hooks, and automation workflows to answer operational questions and route follow-up work.
   - Treat experiments as founder learning loops: prove the workflow, find the failure modes, throw away what does not work, and keep the pieces that can become product or operational leverage.

## Earlier Experience

- Sep 2022 - Aug 2023: Senior Consultant | Cloud Engineer at Hippo
   - Skills: Amazon ECS · AWS Security · GitHub · Amazon Web Services (AWS) · Terraform
   - Set up a white-label solution that uses path-based routing, which is SEO-friendly. This lets you make many websites for different clients and makes businesses grow faster. The goal was achieved by implementing a custom CI/CD, which automatically generates the website and provides comprehensive documentation for patch-based client integration.
   - Reused 90% of existing infrastructure as code and CI/CD codebases, accelerating project delivery times, by analyzing and repurposing components for the deployment of scalable and client-focused web infrastructures.
   - Implemented the infrastructure configuration parity principle, which requires each environment to be identical, by establishing a uniform set of AWS accounts and infrastructure templates. It will result in 90% fewer production errors.

- May 2021 - Jul 2022: Senior Consultant | Cloud Engineer at Firi AS (Project McFly)
   - Skills: Amazon ECS/Fargate · AWS Security · GitHub Actions · Amazon Web Services (AWS) · Terraform · Cloudflare · PostgreSQL/RDS/Aurora · Redis/ElastiCache · Grafana/Prometheus
   - Led the first Project McFly migration from EC2 and BuddyWorks-based deployments to containerized ECS/Fargate services, using GitHub Actions, ECR, ECS, canary plans, and controlled traffic switching to keep production changes low-risk.
   - Built the repeatable infrastructure foundation with Terraform modules, GitHub Actions, self-hosted runners, AWS account organization, environment parity, and deployment templates for test and production services.
   - Hardened network and access controls by reducing public SSH and database exposure, applying AWS SSO/VPN/Session Manager/ECS Exec patterns, using Cloudflare Access and Zero Trust, and cleaning up security groups, secrets, and legacy infrastructure.
   - Modernized data and messaging dependencies through RDS Multi-AZ/Aurora work, test/prod database parity, Liquibase migrations, Redis replacement, MSK/Redpanda research, and operational RDS patching.
   - Improved reliability and cost control with CloudWatch/ECS logs, Grafana/Prometheus/Better Uptime/Slack alerting, ECS self-healing practices, Fargate right-sizing, cost usage reporting, and removal of dangling resources.

- Oct 2020 - Apr 2021: Consultant | Cloud Engineer at Ovrture
   - Skills: Amazon ECS · AWS Security · GitHub · Amazon Web Services (AWS) · Terraform
    - A 99.99% uptime was achieved by implementing containerization and automated deployment processes (GitHub Actions) as part of the migration of applications to AWS ECS (EC2/Fargate).
    - Using IaC with Terraform and AWS ECS to manage containers reduced maintenance by 90%. 
    - By using CI/CD for the Infrastructure and Applications, errors were almost eliminated. A multiple-environments setup with configuration parity lets teams test their changes before releasing them.
    - Implemented GitOps principles and used GitHub Actions to streamline deployment processes, leading to a 70% faster release cycle.
    - The handling of peak traffic periods was handled by an out-of-box scaling solution, which is part of AWS ECS.
    - The implementation of centralized microservices traffic through a single reusable Amazon ALB has resulted in a 30% reduction in operational expenses.

- 2017-2020: Technical Director at Time for Image
    - Skills: VMWare ESXi · Gitlab · Python (Programming Language) · Project Management · CIO · Kubernetes
    - Created an automation system that integrates payment systems, social networks, the corporate website, and the accounting system for impulse buy products, escalating sales from 30-50 manual transactions per day to 1000+ automated transactions, with only 1 salesperson needed
    - Achieved a 98% reduction in accounting tasks by automating data retrieval and integrating APIs into financial systems
    - Automated the student onboarding process, reducing operational efforts
    - Created a new revenue stream through the "Education Extension" product, increasing sales by automating access to educational materials
    - Enabled daily deployments by implementing a CI/CD system
    - Migrated legacy systems to Docker and Kubernetes
  
- 2010-2017: Senior System Administrator at Arima Holding Corp
    - Skills: Microsoft Exchange · Active Directory · Network Security · Microsoft Servers · NetApp · VMWare ESXi · System Administration
    - Successfully migrated all company servers to VMware, reducing IT operational costs and enhancing system security through strategic planning and execution of virtualization technologies.
    - Optimized the IT department's budget, reducing waste and maximizing resource utilization by establishing a controlled software licensing environment.
    - Insured full compliance with software licensing requirements, reducing company risks and establishing a controlled licensing environment
    - Mentored two interns annually in system administration, contributing to their professional growth

- 2008-2010: Freelance Web Developer
    - Skills: HTLM · Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) · Website Updating · Adobe Photoshop · Digital Photography
    - Improved website usability and visual appeal for an online wedding dress store by implementing HTML and CSS enhancements, optimizing product photos, facilitating addition of new products to the website

## Education

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- 2010 - 2014:
  - Moscow State University of Instrument Engineering and Computer Science
  - Master Degree, GPA: 4.55 / 5
  - Computers, complexes, systems, and networks
- 2006 - 2010:
  - Moscow College of Informatics and Computer Engineering
  - Engineer’s degree, GPA: 4.23 / 5
  - Computer software and automated systems

## Additional Education

### AWS
[https://www.aws.training/](https://www.aws.training/)

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### Anthropic
[https://anthropic.skilljar.com/](https://anthropic.skilljar.com/)

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### HashiCorp
[https://www.hashicorp.com/certification/](https://www.hashicorp.com/certification/)

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### HIPAA Training
[https://hipaatraining.com](https://hipaatraining.com/)

HIPAA Security and Business Associate awareness training completed in 2026.

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### FinOps

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### Udemy
[https://udemy.com](https://udemy.com/)

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### Stepik
[https://stepik.org](https://stepik.org/)

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### NetApp

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### Orca Security 
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### INTUIT (National Open University)
[https://intuit.ru](https://intuit.ru/)

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