CTO · AI startup builder · Remote

Igor Pavlov

Engineering leader with 13+ years of experience building and scaling teams, growing engineers into leaders, and designing delivery processes that work without constant direct involvement. I stay hands-on enough to make strong architecture decisions and earn trust with engineers. I treat AI tooling as a core part of how engineering teams operate, not a separate workstream: automating workflows, improving developer experience, and transforming how work gets done.

Skills

Engineering

  • Ruby
  • Elixir
  • Python
  • JavaScript
  • Rails
  • Django
  • Flask
  • GraphQL
  • REST APIs

Data & Infrastructure

  • PostgreSQL
  • Redis
  • ClickHouse
  • NATS
  • AWS
  • Docker
  • Git

AI & Tooling

  • LLM pipelines
  • Agentic workflows
  • Analysis pipelines
  • Detection systems
  • RAG
  • Prompt engineering

Experience

Dates May 2025 - Present
Company Deeplens
Role Chief Technical Officer
Scope AI product development, engineering leadership, remote

Responsibilities

  • Building the company and product from scratch as CTO
  • Building media monitoring workflows that turn multiple external sources into a unified analysis pipeline
  • Working with text and visual content to improve analysis and detection quality
  • Iterating with early access users and incorporating real-user feedback into the product
  • Building agentic workflows for research, development, and internal tooling
  • Designed development and testing practices built around AI assistance, including prompt regression, output benchmarking, and automated review cycles
  • Continuously automating and transforming internal workflows so the team operates beyond what its headcount would normally allow
  • Owning engineering decisions across architecture, delivery, and iteration speed
Dates May 2022 - May 2025
Company Uzum, Tashkent
Role Team Leader / Unit Tech Leader
Scope Back-end, team-leading, team-training

Responsibilities

  • Scaled a cross-functional unit from 3 to 30 people (engineers, analysts, ops); grew two team leads who now run their own teams independently
  • Built and shipped internal tooling for bank operations and card issuance under tight reliability requirements, enabling 40,000+ cards issued
  • Designed backend services and architecture to handle operational load in a fintech environment where failures are not an option
  • Introduced an architectural committee to distribute technical decision-making across the unit
  • Established hiring, delivery, and onboarding processes across the unit
  • Built an internal knowledge base that evolved from static docs into an AI-assisted tool for customer care and engineering teams
  • Introduced AI-assisted tooling into team workflows to automate repetitive processes and improve delivery speed
  • Worked closely with InfoSec on compliance and security practices; ran internal technical trainings
Dates February 2018 - April 2022
Company Radar/Worki/VK Работа, Moscow
Role Back-end Engineer → Head of development
Scope Back-end, dev ops, team-leading

Responsibilities

  • Progressed from Back-end Engineer to Head of Development within one year
  • Built and grew the engineering team from scratch to 11–20 people; established hiring processes, 1-to-1s, 360 reviews, and performance cycles
  • Built a flexible monetization system that enabled new revenue streams and self-serve B2B client integrations across multiple business cases
  • Led migration and rewrite of services to Elixir and Ruby; owned infrastructure scaling and site reliability for a platform with hundreds of thousands of users
  • Forked and extended prerender.io to support external headless Chrome instances; deep work on NATS and NATS Streaming
  • Built custom NATS clients for Ruby and Elixir; developed a lightweight ClickHouse package for internal use
Dates March 2017 - March 2018
Company Silicon Valley Insight
Role Senior Software engineer
Scope Web development, Machine Learning, Cryptocurrency startups development

Responsibilities

  • Support of merryjane.com, implementation of new features for backend (Rails) and frontend parts (React.js, Next.js). Changed all deployment scheme from Dokku at EC2 to AWS EBS, wrote a small deployment tool for automatic creation of everything using AWS credentials(tool is based on boto3).
  • Consulting and leading Python developers at Django project.
  • Development of private framework on Rails 5+GraphQL at backend and React.Native+Apollo at frontend.
  • Developed an SEO application for estimating costs using different SDKs in Python+Django.
  • Led a team of 2 backend and 2 frontend developers; introduced dry-transaction patterns and built a flexible, well-tested system.
  • Built a small crypto project for automated trading of cryptocurrencies using signals from different sources.
Dates December 2016 - April 2017
Company Deep Learn Inc.
Role Senior Software developer
Scope Web development, Machine Learning

Responsibilities

  • Analysis of applications on Ruby and Python, implementing new features at Ruby and Python flask applications, covering RoR project with tests (Rspec), interaction with UI (React) at https://dailypro.com
  • Development of django application and jupyter at prototype of https://auger.ai/ called deephub at http://deephub.com/
Dates September 2015 - September 2018
Company Atomic Works, Montreal
Role Unity3D developer
Scope Scientific Researches, CAD development

Responsibilities

  • Creating UI for scientific project with 3D objects
  • Simulating atomic and molecular interaction
  • Creating back-end services with Python and Ruby on Rails

Earlier career

2011-2016 was a progression from software development into backend work, game development, and product engineering. Key roles included Software Developer at PromService, PHP Developer at Involta, Ruby/ActionScript Developer at Social Quantum, Ruby on Rails Developer at 404 Group, Unity3D Developer at Atomic Works, and Senior Software Developer at Deep Learn Inc.

  • Built applications for industrial and hardware integrations at PromService.
  • Developed web products and internal tooling at Involta.
  • Worked on game backend and client-side optimization at Social Quantum.
  • Delivered Rails product work and UI integration at 404 Group.
  • Built 3D/scientific software and backend services at Atomic Works on a part-time basis alongside other roles.
  • Worked on Ruby, Python, Django, Flask, React, and machine learning prototypes at Deep Learn Inc.

Education

Year 2014
Institution Ivanovo State Power University
Degree Software Engineer

Formal education in software engineering.