CTO / Head of AI & Engineering with 10 years building games and XR products. For the past 4 years I have led product and platform development for market leaders in the cruise and pharmaceutical industries.
I run engineering organizations from both the technical and the product side — architecture, delivery, hiring, technical strategy — and build the teams and processes that hold up after launch.
Cloud: AWS, Google Cloud, Firebase
Backend: NestJS, TypeScript, REST APIs
Clients: Unity, C#, Flutter, WebGL
XR: Meta Quest, HoloLens, HTC Vive, Vuforia
Delivery: CI/CD (GitHub Actions, GitLab, Jenkins)
Practices: Automated testing, observability, releases
Security & Compliance: ISO 27001 certified; SOC 2, HIPAA and GDPR aligned
I joined Lucid Reality Labs as Unity Architect / Technical Lead on a project for the world’s top cruise company, with around 50 engineers involved. After it shipped I was promoted to Head of Engineering, and later to Head of AI & Engineering as the company’s AI work grew.
In practice the role carries CTO scope: I own technical strategy for the company, advise the CEO directly, and am the final technical authority across Unity, backend, QA and AI.
Technology adoption
I decide which technologies we take on and when. Over the past two years that has mostly meant bringing AI into how the Unity, QA, backend and marketing teams work, modernizing the development toolchain, and tightening security practices across projects.
Starting new projects
At the start of a project I work with the team to design the architecture for both the Unity client and the backend, set up the CI/CD pipelines, and set the technical priorities. Much of it comes down to choosing where we can afford to move fast, and where changing our minds later would be too expensive.
Hiring and skill evaluation
I run technical interviews across the company — QA leads, backend and full-stack engineers, Unity developers — and have hired more than 20 engineers here. I also built the annual skill evaluation program for the Unity teams: several sessions per engineer, written feedback, and a plan for the year ahead.
Internal technical consulting
People come to me for technical decisions at every level, from the CEO on strategy to a QA engineer stuck on a specific problem. It is the part of the job that keeps me close to what is actually happening in the code.
Pre-sale evaluation
I run the technical assessment on incoming projects together with the sales and creative teams: breaking the work into phases, estimating who we need and for how long — Unity, backend, web, QA — and naming the risks and the open questions we would have to investigate before committing to a scope.
A global pharmaceutical leader adopted the iXR Platform as their own XR delivery stack. It is the largest rollout of the platform so far: ten engineers on our side and ten of theirs, whom we onboarded, with me above all of it.
We have delivered around half a dozen projects on the platform for them, with a similar number scheduled over the coming months.
The engagement covers:
This is the project I am proudest of. It is our own product rather than a client’s, delivered at pace and at volume inside a global company, and their engineers now build on it themselves.
Due to confidentiality, the customer and the project names cannot be disclosed.
The iXR Platform is my product. I shaped what it should be before the project formally started, and I lead it across every layer: cloud infrastructure, backend, front-end, the Unity client applications and the authoring tools.
In effect it is a Firebase-class backend for enterprise XR, built on AWS. It lets a customer compose their own scenarios codeless, by dragging and connecting nodes in a visual editor. A single Unity launcher consumes the resulting scenario definitions and endpoints at runtime and executes them, so a customer ships a new experience without shipping a new build.
The result is speed: building an XR scenario on the platform takes about six times less time than the same work through a conventional Unity development pipeline.
What the platform provides out of the box:
I don’t write the production code — the engineering teams do. The architecture, the product decisions and the roadmap are mine, and in practice I am the person who holds the whole picture of what the platform does and why.
Due to confidentiality, customer names and commercial details cannot be disclosed.
The Client is a leading company in the cruise industry. I joined at the inception of the project, drawing on the two years of research and prototyping they had already done.
I was the first architect on the project, and we had three months to design the infrastructure from the ground up for a long-term cross-platform game. With that time and the calibre of the developers we hired, we built the most advanced architecture and tooling I have worked with. I am still proud of what that team and I delivered for the Client.
My responsibilities:
Due to confidentiality, specific project details and product requirements cannot be disclosed.
Solitaire Grand Harvest is the second project I worked on at Playtika. I joined during a critical two-year milestone to rewrite the game from C++ on the Murl engine to C# on the Unity engine.
The game was ranked top in the Casual Card games category, with a large and constantly growing codebase that had to be rewritten for the new engine and rolled out without disrupting the live product. I worked on both the feature and the core teams, on project infrastructure, tooling and production support.
In addition to my development responsibilities, I onboarded new developers as their "buddy" and actively participated in PR reviews for our team and others, even when it wasn't directly my responsibility.
We successfully completed the app migration from the Murl engine to Unity and began the continuous rollout of the new client worldwide.
Up to that point it was the most advanced technology stack and the most experienced developers I had worked with, matched only by the cruise Meta-Verse project that came later. The best part was the complete absence of legacy code: we rebuilt an actively developing game from scratch in two years.
GeekBrains is an online learning platform specializing in IT. They invited me to lead the Game Development course in a webinar format for a couple of months.
I conducted 10 webinars for adult students in the Game Development faculty at GeekBrains. While I had a list of required subjects to introduce to the students, I also included valuable topics from the Game Development industry. Additionally, I participated in the homework code review process and provided public reviews of common mistakes and best practices.
At the end of the course, I received excellent feedback from the students, including comments like "the best lecturer in the Game Development faculty at GeekBrains in the past two years."
GeekBrains later contacted me again to propose another Game Development course, but I was no longer interested at that time.
Classic Solitaire is my own mobile project, built gradually over several years. I use it as a playground for trying new technologies, approaches and tools on a live product. It is where I learned the publishing process for Google Play and the App Store, and what it takes to run a game with tens of thousands of active users single-handed. I’ve published more than 10 games and apps as pet or freelance projects, but this is the largest I have carried alone.
Some info about the game:
The technologies under the hood:
Design Glory is an online learning platform specializing in IT. They approached me to create a course on developing a video AR portals app in Unity for mobile devices.
When I began developing the video course, my goal was to create an entire AR Portals app in Unity without using code. This approach would make the course easy to understand even for kids who are not familiar with C# or any other programming language.
As a result, I recorded a series of small videos on creating the AR Portals mobile app, from downloading Unity to building for Android, all without using any C# scripts. Additionally, I created extra recordings for those interested in diving into C# scripting.
The course was published on the Design Glory website and was available for purchase for some time.
I moved to Playtika from the CTO seat at an early-stage startup, trading breadth of ownership for depth: a 4,000-person international game company specializing in mobile casual games, with several titles permanently at the top of their charts.
I initially joined Playtika for the Pirate Kings project at the start of a major milestone. We needed to change the core mechanics of a significant game with a large legacy codebase: swapping the Wheel mechanics for Slots mechanics. This change impacted the entire game, as it altered the core game loop on which all other meta-features depended.
I worked in one of the project teams, mostly on new meta-features. I also read through the rest of the project regularly and reviewed pull requests from other developers, including teams that were not mine, to understand how the pieces fitted together. In my own time I proposed and built several Unity Editor tools to simplify our workflow.
At the end of the year our R&D Director named me one of the three most performant developers out of fifty. I still count that as one of my better results: I had been on the project six months, while the other two had been there for years.
After a year of migrating to the new core mechanics and building meta-features on top of them, the product performed below what the business expected and the project was moved to Support mode in a single decision. I moved to another Playtika project: Solitaire Grand Harvest.
The company was founded in Kyiv in the winter of 2019 by Israeli investors.
The project is a VR entertainment system which consists of several components:
I took the CTO position, overseeing: 1 core-system developer, 2 designers, 3 backend developers, 2 frontend developers, and 1 QA specialist. I was the sole VR developer on the team. Additionally, we had Marketing, Business Development, and later, Support teams.
I ran the development process end to end: task management, stand-ups, the NoSQL data model, data transfer between services, feature prioritization. I set the direction of the team and owned the product itself — its architecture, its services and the overall concept. I also built the working relationship between the marketing, development and support teams, the product owner and the investors.
The core-feature developer and I were involved in opening a new office in Prague, where we spent a week integrating and training four members of the support team.
We also traveled to Shenzhen, China, where we held over 20 meetings with different factories to find the right hardware supplier for our service, ensuring we could deliver the best product to end-users.
Freelance Project for the Dutch company Viewmaker
The core idea was to develop an AR app with various small features and different kinds of content, using it as a demo app to propose similar AR experiences to local businesses in the Netherlands.
I built the whole application from scratch in Unity on the Vuforia computer vision framework. After a year I handed development to a new developer and moved to managing him and the 3D designer we hired. The app shipped on both Android and iOS.
I developed the following features:
The developed demo app contains content for the following target businesses:
The customer aimed to add several online services to an existing mobile game. They chose Firebase as the cloud platform and needed consultation on its services, integration with Unity, troubleshooting, and No-SQL database architecture (Firebase Realtime Database).
My responsibilities were:
I conducted several consulting sessions (a couple of dozen hours) during the project period to accelerate the game development process for the developer.
I switched from desktop app development to game development in 2016 and worked on UpWork as my main, though not the only, source of contracts. I worked either as the sole game developer or in small teams.
The games I worked on:
Later, I created an UpWork agency and managed several projects for developers and designers within my agency.
Kampov Technology is a Ukrainian B2B company focused on the metallurgy industry of Ukraine.
The UniFactory project consisted of several demo apps for AR and VR for the following devices:
As the sole developer in the emerging company, I created three prototypes:
These prototypes were presented to managers of the largest Ukrainian metallurgy holding, Metinvest, and various plants, including Zaporizhstal. Additionally, I presented the Mixed Reality technology to the United States Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch.
IT Academy "STEP" is an international educational institution.
The local academy invited me to teach “Game Development” in Unity3D to their children. I conducted a 1-month course for young "STEP" students.
The course included:
I was invited by the academy two more times after teaching the course.
Software architecture, Release & production operations, Platform engineering, High-load systems & observability, Engineering leadership, AI-assisted engineering, Game Development industry, IT conferences