Mitya Kozlov

Engineering leader who built a 23-engineer organization from scratch as founding member of a fintech subsidiary: 6 autonomous product squads and a platform team. Doubled feature throughput, reduced churn from 15% to 3%, and enabled 10x customer growth through DDD-based team design and hands-on technical leadership. Combines rare cross-functional depth (product strategy, business operations, platform engineering) with deep Linux and systems expertise.

• Head of Engineering

  Product Development • Platform Engineering • Infrastructure

  Sep 2017 - Feb 2024 • 6 yrs 6 mos

  • Built engineering from zero to 23 (6 product squads, platform team, 4 cities), enabling the flagship SME product (21% of revenue) by pitching the business case to SLT, owning budget and vendor relationships, and personally hiring every engineer.
  • Doubled feature throughput in partnership with Product, Design and business stakeholders by building a DDD-based team topology with a Platform team owning DevEx, infrastructure, and regulatory environment, alongside compact full-stack squads aligned to business domains from onboarding to termination.
  • Reduced engineer churn from 15% to 3% and lifted developer CES from 3.2 to 5.6 by establishing a high-ownership culture built on pull-based delivery, collaborative design reviews, trunk-based development, faster feedback cycles (YBIYRI), and self-service dev environments that cut onboarding to under 1 day.
  • Grew 4 engineers into significantly expanded roles (including junior dev to Team Lead in under 2 years and DB engineer to Platform Tech Lead) by maintaining individual competency maps, setting clear performance expectations, mentoring through regular 1:1s, and providing dedicated training time and budget.
  • Compressed delivery cycle time (p85) from 90 to under 30 days by building CI/CD automation for a distributed Go/C# system spanning 11 time zones, migrating to private Kubernetes cloud, and adopting trunk-based deployment with automated failover.
  • Enabled 10x customer growth by leading a gradual decomposition of a legacy monolith into modular scalable event-driven architecture while maintaining both systems in parallel, aligning service boundaries to business domains using DDD and Hexagonal Architecture.
  • Reduced MTTR by 45% and maintained a demand-based 99.9% SLI aligned to transaction schedules by introducing observability standards (Grafana, VictoriaMetrics) with on-call runbooks and structured incident response.

• Head of Operations

  Jul 2014 - Sep 2017 • 3 yrs 3 mos

  • Identified and validated a new SME financing opportunity through 100+ customer interviews and competitor analysis, securing SLT approval by building a business case projecting 300+ bps margin aligned with the group's market expansion strategy.
  • Boosted conversion 2.6x and CLTV by 29% by compressing time-to-money from days to hours through digital onboarding, pre-approved buyer limits, and end-to-end automation of the financing lifecycle.
  • Doubled pipeline velocity and expanded addressable market by 17% by orchestrating GTM that blended sales-assisted outbound with product-led growth, leveraging the group's retail banking network.
  • Reduced payment cycle time by 73% and operational overhead by 19% by designing real-time payment processing pipelines with ISO 20022-compliant APIs.
  • Delivered $0.9M in annual interest savings and added 30 bps in revenue by building a cashflow forecasting system and increasing payment auto-allocation from 30% to 90%+ through pattern recognition algorithms.

• Senior Product Manager

  Nov 2010 - Jul 2014 • 3 yrs 9 mos

• Project Lead

  Jun 2007 - Nov 2010 • 3 yrs 6 mos