Engineering leader
CTO · VP Engineering

Platform engineering
DevOps & SRE

Open to roles
Europe · remote, hybrid, on‑site

Andrey Lipsky

Building engineering teams and infrastructure that scale.

Open to
CTO, VP Engineering and Head of Platform / Infrastructure roles
Based in
Poznań, Poland
Record
25+ years in technology, 15+ leading engineering organizations
01About

Every successful engineering organization eventually outgrows the way it was originally built.

Growth changes everything. Teams become departments. Coordination gets harder. The practices that worked for 5 engineers rarely work for 30, and rarely work for 300.
Portrait of Andrey Lipsky

I've spent over 25 years in technology: the first decade hands-on as a software engineer, the last 15+ leading engineering organizations.

Most recently, as Deputy CTO of a regulated EU payments processor, I led a 28-person cross-functional organization through a 4-person leadership team I built via hiring and internal promotion, owned a multi-million-euro infrastructure budget, and turned platform reliability into a revenue-protection function.

Infrastructure, platform engineering, DevOps, SRE, service management and business continuity aren't separate disciplines to me. They're different ways of solving the same problem: helping engineering organizations scale without accumulating unnecessary complexity.

I'm a player-coach. I stay close enough to architecture to make the hard calls myself, and I do my best work where technical depth and people leadership both matter, and where the impact is visible and direct.

02Areas of impact

Six areas. One problem: scaling without unnecessary complexity.

  • Organization design & leadership

    Leadership teams built by hiring and by growing engineers into leads. Clear ownership, delegated budgets, managers who actually manage.

  • Platform & infrastructure

    Hybrid cloud across AWS, GCP and private cloud. Kubernetes self-service platforms. Capacity, cost and vendor management.

  • Reliability & service management

    Incident, problem, change and release management built from zero. On-call, disaster recovery and business continuity.

  • Regulated delivery

    ISO 27001, SOC 2, DORA, MiCA: processes that produce evidence, not paperwork.

  • Data & BI

    Data platforms that management, finance, compliance and product teams actually rely on.

  • Practical AI adoption

    Company-wide LLM rollout, internal models on AWS Bedrock, AI-assisted code review, an AI agent for traffic protection, EU AI Act readiness.

03Where I help

Situations I'm usually brought in for.

Delivery slows down as the team grows

More engineers, more teams, more meetings, and somehow less gets shipped.

I redesign how teams are split, who owns what and how decisions are made, and build a leadership layer that can run it: by hiring and by growing engineers into leads.

Org design · leadership

Engineering needs a leader, now

A key leader is leaving, commitments to clients are at risk and the team is waiting for direction.

I step in, stabilize the team, keep the promises the business has already made, and hire or grow the person who will take it forward.

Interim · turnaround

Infrastructure has become the bottleneck

Product teams wait on a small platform team for every environment, release or access request.

I turn the platform into a product with self-service paths, clear ownership and costs that someone actually watches.

Platform · DevOps

Outages cost money and trust

Incidents depend on whoever is online, and nobody is sure recovery would work if it were needed.

I build incident, change and recovery practices that hold under pressure, and test them instead of assuming them.

Reliability · SRE

Regulators or enterprise clients ask for proof

An audit, a licence or a big contract requires evidence that processes exist and work.

I set up processes where the evidence is a by-product of daily work, not a project before every audit.

ISO 27001 · SOC 2 · DORA

Everyone uses AI, nobody owns it

Tools spread team by team, with no view of data, cost or risk.

I bring AI into everyday engineering with clear rules: where data can go, what it costs, and where a human stays in the loop.

AI adoption · governance

04Career

2004 to now. Four industries, one direction.

  1. Feb 2023 – Present

    Deputy CTO

    CoinsPaid Regulated EU crypto-payments processor · Fintech

    Engineering leadership for a regulated payments business: platform and infrastructure, DevOps, service management, IT operations, BI and data, business continuity. An organization of 28 led through four team leads.

  2. Feb 2022 – Jan 2023

    Head of Infrastructure & Operations

    Inspectorio Supply-chain SaaS · Product SaaS

    Infrastructure, DevOps/SRE and internal IT for a B2B SaaS platform used by global brands and suppliers. Joined during a leadership transition.

  3. Sep 2017 – Jan 2022

    Head of Internal Development

    Wargaming Global online games · Gamedev

    Internal engineering for a global game publisher: internal tools and development, BI and data analysis, performance testing as a service for studios worldwide.

  4. Oct 2013 – Apr 2017

    Head of DevOps & PMO

    Wargaming Global online games · Gamedev

    DevOps and project management for the web and product platform around the games: player-facing sites, payments, authentication, at high load across several data centers.

  5. Jan 2005 – Sep 2013

    Developer to Head of IT Operations

    velcom National mobile operator · Telecom

    1. 2012–2013Head of IT Operations Department
    2. 2007–2012Head of IT Support & Development Group
    3. 2005–2007Developer

    From building subscriber self-care services to running IT operations for a national mobile operator: support, core IT services and testing.

  6. Jun 2004 – Jan 2005

    Administrator-developer

    ISP Forenet Internet provider · Telecom

    Billing system and server administration for an internet provider.

05How I lead

Every decision has a price, including doing nothing.

Questions I ask in every technical review

  1. What are the risks?
  2. What does it cost to build, and to support?
  3. What happens if the author leaves?
  4. What are the alternatives?
  5. What does doing nothing cost?
  • You build it, you own it.

    Ownership enforced through process, culture and agreements between managers, not org charts.

  • Grow leaders, don't only hire them.

    Two of my four CoinsPaid leads were grown from individual contributors. Three more leads were grown from engineers at Wargaming.

  • No individual heroes.

    Knowledge, ownership and decision-making shouldn't depend on one person.

  • Trade-offs in writing.

    Risks stated openly, recorded, and reviewed later.

  • Player-coach.

    Close enough to architecture to make the hard calls.

06Projects

Side projects, shipped.

Small products I build for my own everyday problems. They keep me close to what it takes to ship.

iPhone app · Live on the App Store since October 2026

Coinarium Coin Album

A collector's album built around how a real collection works: photos of both sides, the album and page where every coin lives, a duplicate check before you buy, a wishlist for trades. No account, no ads.

It started with a spreadsheet of 1,100+ coins and no app that felt like my collection. Shipping it meant walking the whole path myself: architecture and scope, signing and TestFlight, privacy forms, store assets in three languages and App Review. Everything stays on the phone: no server, no account.

SwiftUI · SwiftData · website on Cloudflare

Coinarium coin page: a 20 euro cent coin with an obverse and reverse switch

iPhone app · Version 1.0 built, preparing for the App Store

Isle of Days A diary that writes itself

Every kilometre you walk lifts a piece of your island out of the fog, and how you moved decides what grows there: forest, river, mountain or a quiet heath. One year, one island, made of your own days. No goals, no streaks that burn, no guilt for a missed day.

Under the hood the island is never stored, it is computed: a deterministic procedural generator on a hexagonal grid grows the same map from a seed and your days, on any device. Works with any source in Apple Health, keeps everything on the phone, speaks English, Polish and Russian.

SwiftUI · HealthKit · WidgetKit · no third-party dependencies

A watercolour island map grown from a year of walks, with months named across its regions

Toolbox

  • AWS
  • GCP
  • Private cloud
  • Kubernetes
  • ArgoCD
  • Kargo
  • Karpenter
  • KEDA
  • Prometheus
  • Grafana
  • Cloudflare
  • Airflow
  • Vertica
  • ClickHouse
  • Tableau
  • Jira
  • n8n
  • AWS Bedrock
  • Mesos/Marathon
  • ITIL
  • ISO 27001
  • SOC 2
  • DORA
  • MiCA
  • EU AI Act

Languages & education

Russian, Belarusian
Native
English
Professional working proficiency
Polish
Learning

Engineer's degree, Belarusian State University of Informatics and Radioelectronics (BSUIR), 2000–2005

Machine Learning with Python: Foundations, LinkedIn Learning, 2024

Beyond work

  • Coin collecting
  • Aerial photography with a drone
  • Travel across Europe
  • Home automation: Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi

Available now

Let's talk.

Open to CTO, VP Engineering and Head of Platform / Infrastructure roles. Based in Poznań, Poland; remote, hybrid or on-site in Europe.

References available on request.