Alex Ischenko

Acting as a Fractional CTO and Forward Deployed Engineer for EU/US companies and Berlin-based startups, partnering with founders, CTOs and engineering teams to take agentic AI workflows from prototype to production. Also supporting venture capital and private equity firms in identifying and hiring CTOs, VPs of Engineering and other executive technology leaders for their portfolio companies. Own end-to-end technical delivery of agentic AI systems: discovery, scoping, architecture, implementation, production rollout and adoption. Design and ship full-stack solutions integrating LLMs and agentic workflows into customer products, focused on real workflow impact and production value. Advise founders and CTOs on AI strategy, architecture, build-vs-buy decisions, delivery roadmaps and engineering enablement. Support VC and PE firms with executive technology hiring, assessing candidates for technical depth, leadership capability, AI readiness and ability to scale portfolio companies. Lead hands-on agentic AI workshops for engineering teams using Codex and Claude Code, enabling teams to build, evaluate and ship AI-powered workflows. Contribute production-grade code across frontend and backend systems using Python and TypeScript/JavaScript when speed, clarity or quality depend on it. Balance scope, speed and quality across concurrent engagements, removing blockers early and driving delivery toward production outcomes. Turn recurring implementation patterns into reusable playbooks, building blocks and tooling that help teams move faster after engagements. Share structured field feedback on frontier model capabilities, failure modes, evaluations and guardrails required in production.

Building ExecMatchAI - an AI-native executive mentorship and matching platform for the next generation of AI-driven leaders. ExecMatchAI helps identify, assess, mentor, and match AI-transformation leaders using a multi-agent system that combines leadership scoring, AI-readiness evaluation, voice interviews, mentoring workflows, and executive search intelligence. Built the platform solo with 20+ custom AI agents, owning the full product and technology stack: - Product vision and platform strategy - Agentic system design and multi-agent orchestration - AI mentor, AI recruiter, and business development voice agents - Executive leadership scoring across structured readiness metrics - RAG knowledge base, evaluation flows, guardrails, and AI governance - Full-stack engineering, cloud infrastructure, security, privacy, and compliance - GDPR, EU AI Act awareness, privacy-by-design, DPIA, and monetization model Designed and shipped production voice AI agents using Conversational AI, WebRTC, transcript aggregation, structured conversation flows, and business rules to keep agents on-task across multi-turn conversations. Built a hybrid voice + text experience powered by a pgvector RAG knowledge base, keeping chat and voice agents aligned on the same source of truth. Operating at the intersection of founder leadership, hands-on architecture, staff-engineer-level execution, and AI-native product development - using agentic workflows to compress the path from concept to production.

SaaS | AI-first strategy | Fully remote | U.S. company Building an AI-first, fully-remote company with unlimited scaling capabilities. Driving the tech strategy and AI transformation of a global link management platform into the #1 provider of branded short links, powering 3B tracked clicks monthly, managing 1B active links, and achieving 99.99% uptime on a highly scalable, reliable architecture built for global traffic. Key achievements include: AI-First Growth & Reliability: Embedded AI across systems to improve efficiency, reduce incidents, and deliver the highest levels of quality and security. Future-Proof Scaling Strategy: Defined and executed technical strategy for sustainable hypergrowth, supporting over 100K links per second and enabling seamless global expansion. Data Leadership: Built the company’s first enterprise-grade data warehouse and defined a robust data strategy, empowering actionable insights, advanced analytics, and AI-driven decision-making. Security & Compliance: Established rigorous standards including SOC 2 certification, ensuring enterprise-level trust and resilience. Customer Impact at Scale: Delivered world-class performance for 1.3M+ customers, including industry leaders such as PayPal, Oracle, Toyota, NBA, Armani, Volvo, Cisco, Sequoia Capital, and more. Additionally, empowered 100K+ developers worldwide with robust APIs. Passionate about building teams and platforms that push the limits of scale, resilience, and AI innovation - while always keeping the customer experience at the core. Our whitepaper materials about our insane scaling capabilities (more than 100K links per second) and success story with Wonder Cave https://rbnd.bio/aws-paper

Fintech | E-commerce | SaaS | Technical Strategy | Engineering Leadership Building the future of selling digital products and innovating entrepreneurship. https://elopage.com/ SaaS, Fintech, E-commerce. Series A 32M€+ Achievements: - Doubled delivery speed by reorganizing functional teams into smaller cross-functional units for 80+ FTEs (around 10 direct reports), including both in-house and remote teams. - Optimized cloud costs by reducing database expenses by 70%. - Developed a solid technical and product strategy for the international expansion - Full CI/CD integration, reducing automation test runtime from 60 minutes to 15 minutes. - Stabilized the release process, reducing the number of incidents by 300%. - As a public speaker at numerous technical events, I built a strong company brand, which helped us hire more than 30 people within one year (using only our internal talent acquisition team) from companies like Shopify, Solarisbank, Adjust, and Marley Spoon. Other responsibilities: - Scaling technology platforms in a high-growth, scale-up environment (over 70,000 businesses use our platform). - Establishing a strong culture of transparency, diversity, and regular, honest feedback across the department. - Identifying and mitigating potential risks associated with technology development, including technical debt, resource constraints, and regulatory compliance issues. - Creating development handbooks and best practices from scratch across the entire engineering organization. - Responsible for developing robust and scalable system architectures to ensure the company's technology solutions are designed to accommodate growth and adapt to evolving requirements. - Establishing and monitoring KPIs for the engineering team and identifying areas for improvement. - Conducting technical due diligence of external companies for potential acquisitions. - Promoting continuous learning and providing opportunities for training and mentorship.

#Fintech, #Unicorn, #PayLater, #BNPL, #B2B, #PaymentAPI - Shaping the future of Fintech with Pay Later, Payment API, Risks, etc at the hottest payment Unicorn of Europe - Established a strong technical strategy and solid company culture during the acquisition of more than 20 companies and the hypergrowth from 100 to 1000 employees within two years. - Building a strong architecture for the next fintech expansion - Managing the different engineering cross-functional teams across Austria, Germany and other countries (more than 100 FTEs in the structure, around 10 direct reports) - Hiring engineers and scaling the teams - Mentoring engineering leaders and the architects - Create a culture of inclusivity, transparency and openness in the diverse set of engineering teams - Distributes teams across Germany, Austria, Denmark, other countries

- Shaping the future architecture of payments at the hottest payment Unicorn of Europe - Working on the technical strategy for the enterprise architectural vision of the company

#Insurtech, #Healthcare, #Animal insurance #Startup, #Zurich, #B2B, #B2C, #SaaS, #AffiliateMarketing - Managing engineering teams, with building from scratch next generation insurance products for dental health. Team consists of Frontend, Backend developers, DevOps, QA Automation engineers, Freelancers, etc. - Representing company from the tech side for the investors - Preparing technical due diligence, which played a big role for acquiring company by Zurich (in the TOP 10 world insurance companies) - Planning budgets for the team and infrastructure - Coaching and mentoring team members, through 1:1s and honest feedback - Building software architecture of the product, developing and applying best code practices for the teams. Continuous code review - Effective management of the remote and in-house teams, using Agile approaches (scrum, kanban, etc) - Building scalable microservices with teams - Building scalable affiliate marketing service - Applying GDPR rules to the services and infrastructure

- Managing engineering team, with building job platform from scratch - Hiring new team members - Setting strategy and goals across engineering teams - Creating best practices for teams, continuous code review, code style guides - Representing company from the technical side on different events, pitches - Building microservices with team, based on REST API - Using Agile methodologies to manage team (scrum, kanban, etc) - Developing tech-focused company culture - Building software architecture of the project and main core functionality

- Was responsible for the development from scratch of the gaming platform's Core, with traffic, more than one million unique users per day. - Leading several projects, connected with subscriptions, integrations with different APIs, etc. - Developing software architecture of the platform. - Teaching and coaching developers. - Creating best practices for code for development teams.

Project Leadership Spearheaded development teams across multiple sectors, including Logistics, FinTech, Healthcare, and Real Estate, ensuring high-quality deliverables for clients in the US and EU. Client Collaboration Worked as the main technical contact, helping clients understand how their business needs could be turned into technical solutions. Team Management Managed and mentored cross-functional engineering teams, fostering a collaborative environment and driving continuous improvement in coding standards and development practices. Technical Strategy Developed and executed technical strategies, aligning project goals with the latest industry trends and best practices to optimize performance and scalability. Multi-Project Coordination Successfully balanced multiple projects simultaneously, ensuring timely delivery and maintaining high standards across diverse industries. System Architecture Designed and implemented robust, scalable system architectures tailored to specific industry needs, from secure payment gateways in FinTech to compliance-focused healthcare systems. Code Review & Quality Assurance Led code reviews and established QA processes, ensuring code quality, security, and adherence to regulatory requirements across all projects. Agile Methodologies Championed Agile and Scrum methodologies, improving team productivity, adaptability, and responsiveness to changing project requirements. Technology Stack Optimization Evaluated and selected the appropriate technology stacks for each project, maximizing efficiency and future-proofing systems. Stakeholder Communication Provided clear, regular updates to stakeholders, bridging the gap between technical teams and business leaders to align expectations and deliver value.

Completed an advanced MIT Professional Education course in person on the MIT campus in Cambridge / Boston. The program focused on applying modern machine learning, predictive analytics, and NLP methods to large-scale and unstructured data problems. The course covered practical ML applications, model performance constraints, scaling challenges, data dimensionality, storage and computation trade-offs, and the limits of what predictive analytics can reliably provide. For my work as a CTO and AI builder, the course strengthened my ability to evaluate where ML, NLP, LLMs, and agentic AI systems can create real business impact, especially in domains with complex workflows, textual data, risk assessment, and healthcare-related use cases. It also sharpened my perspective on moving from AI prototypes to production-ready, scalable, and responsible AI systems.